Charcoal, Wood, and Metal: Charmaine Lurch’s Being, Belonging and Grace
An online lecture by Katherine McKittrick
February 16th, 2020
12pm-1:00pm
Drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s “rethinking aesthetics” and Andrea Fatona’s "undulating depths of fields,” this paper will theorize the charcoal drawings of visual artist Charmaine Lurch as unwieldy and provisional moments of joy. Rather than exalting Black joy, the paper will demonstrate how Lurch’s aesthetic decisions visually gesture blackness as a location of entanglement, one that captures brief moments of happiness—relief, actually—and nests them within the broader context of racial violence, colonialism, and extraction.
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87222567837?pwd=QUdob0NaQzV0aFFGckk0Y2VDb2xXUT09
Passcode: Charcoal
Bio: Katherine McKittrick is Professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She authored Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) and edited and contributed to Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Duke University Press 2015). Her most recent monograph, Dear Science and Other Stories (Duke University Press, 2021) is an exploration of Black methodologies. She is currently working on two projects: the first, unnamed, attends to how theories of ecology and extraction emerge in Black diaspora studies; the second, Pastel Blue, studies colour, colour theory, image-making, and Black aesthetics.
12pm-1:00pm
Drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s “rethinking aesthetics” and Andrea Fatona’s "undulating depths of fields,” this paper will theorize the charcoal drawings of visual artist Charmaine Lurch as unwieldy and provisional moments of joy. Rather than exalting Black joy, the paper will demonstrate how Lurch’s aesthetic decisions visually gesture blackness as a location of entanglement, one that captures brief moments of happiness—relief, actually—and nests them within the broader context of racial violence, colonialism, and extraction.
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87222567837?pwd=QUdob0NaQzV0aFFGckk0Y2VDb2xXUT09
Passcode: Charcoal
Bio: Katherine McKittrick is Professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She authored Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) and edited and contributed to Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Duke University Press 2015). Her most recent monograph, Dear Science and Other Stories (Duke University Press, 2021) is an exploration of Black methodologies. She is currently working on two projects: the first, unnamed, attends to how theories of ecology and extraction emerge in Black diaspora studies; the second, Pastel Blue, studies colour, colour theory, image-making, and Black aesthetics.