The Art History Student Lecture Series committee has organized a two-part event centered around Saint Louis-based, post-disciplinary artist Damon Davis. During the first part of the event we will screen Whose Streets?, an award-winning documentary focused on the events that took place in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. Following the screening and a short reception, Davis will take part in a dialogue with D. Scot Miller – a Bay Area curator, visual artist, and author of the Afro-Surrealist manifesto. The dialogue will also feature Associate Professor Dr. Rebecca Wanzo of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department at Washington University in St. Louis, with introductions and commentary by poet and culture critic Eileen G’Sell of the College Writing Program at Washington University in St. Louis and faculty member of Washington University’s Prison Education Project.

Eileen G’Sell has recently published articles relating to Afro-Surrealism, Damon Davis and Whose Streets?. In this Hyperallergic article, G’Sell writes about Damon Davis’ most recent show. G’Sell also did a profile of Damon Davis and Whose Streets? for ALIVE magazine, and published an interview with co-director Sabaah Folayan for the national feminist magazine DAME.

Afro-Surrealism is a literary and cultural aesthetic that responds to mainstream surrealism in order to reflect the experience of blackness. It is also the movement with which Davis identifies his visual and sonic work for his most recent exhibition and accompanying music album Darker Gods in the Garden of the Low-Hanging Heavens. The dialogue is entitled “Afro-Surrealism/Futurism: Radical Black Imagination” and will examine ways in which the movements of Afro-Surrealism and Futurism may be used to situate Davis’s recent work within a larger movement of black contemporary artists imagining new mythologies in response to the tropes surrounding black identity in America. To read more about Afro-Surrealism, see Afro-Surrealism: What Black Is and Can Be.

The event will take place on Friday, March 1st in Hillman 70.

Film screening of “Whose Streets?” (2017): 3:00 – 5:00 pm

Film screening is admission by ticket only and not open to the public. 

Reception: 5:00 – 5:30 pm

Moderated Dialogue: 5:30 – 6:30 pm

Sponsored by the Department of Art History and Archaeology. Co-sponsored by American Culture Studies, African and American Studies, and The Gephardt Institute for Civic and Community Engagement.