BlackGrounds is a new lecture series co-presented by VCUarts’s department of Art History and the ICA at VCU. The series will feature innovative art historical scholarship on the many ways in which artists from Africa and its diasporas explore the dialogue between the global and the local. BlackGrounds seeks to offer critical and historical context to regionally and nationally grounded discourses of Black identity and belonging, as well as globally imagined geographies of Black diasporic and Pan-African community.
Cherise Smith is the Joseph D. Jamail Chair in African American Studies in the Department African & African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin where she is affiliated with Art History. Her research centers on African American art, the history of photography, performance, and contemporary art. She is the author of Michael Ray Charles: Studies in Blackness (University of Texas Press, 2020) which won the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art from the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
