The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts hosted Architecture, Art and the Experience of Blackness - the first in a series of symposia that will explore issues of race, gender and ethnicity as they relate to the practice of architecture and the visual arts.
The symposium brought together speakers whose creative and scholarly works intersect with issues of race and identity. The event provided an opportunity for critical reflection on the role that race plays in the creation and interpretation of art and architecture. Chancellor Wrighton and university trustee Ronald L. Thompson delivered opening remarks.
Presenters included Willie Cole, acclaimed artist whose work was featured in the exhibition On the Margins, curated by Dean Colangelo; Darell Fields, Univ. Arkansas, editor of the journal APPX, which explores black modernity within the context of architectural discourse; Kymberly Pinder, Art Institute of Chicago, whose research focuses on critical race theory in visual culture; Yolande Daniels, Columbia Univ., co-founder of studio SUMO; Hamza Walker, associate curator, Renaissance Society at Univ. of Chicago, a non-collecting museum dedicated to contemporary art; painter Radcliffe Bailey, whose works are found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Chicago Art Institute; and Craig Barton, Univ. Virginia, whose practice focuses on helping African-American communities preserve and develop cultural resources.
Igor Marjanovic, Sam Fox School and symposium organizer, Tebogo Schultz, Christner, Inc., and V-P, Nat’l Org. of Minority Architects-STL, and Krista Thompson, Northwestern Univ., who teaches on race and representation and the visual cultures of colonialism, moderated the sessions.
Participants were shuttled to the Saint Louis Art Museum where Andrew Walker, curator of American art, presented a gallery talk on the exhibition African American Abstraction: St. Louis Connections.
The symposium was cosponsored by HOK, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the St. Louis American and Grice Group Architects, Washington University's Office of Diversity Initiatives, the African & African American Studies Program and the Department of Art History & Archaeology, both in Arts & Sciences.