Haunted: The Black Body as Ancestor and Spectre

The University of Maryland’s Center for Literary and Comparative Studies is proud to announce a new program for the Antiracism: Communities + Collaborations series co-sponsored by The Phillips Collection. Bridget R. Cooks and Robert Cozzolino will be in conversation discussing their recent projects regarding representations of the Black body in art. From the spectral to lifelike reproductions in wax, how do these reproductions of the Black body recount the narratives of lived experiences?

SPEAKERS

Bridget R. Cooks is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on African American artists, Black visual culture, and museum criticism. Cooks has worked in museum education and has curated several exhibitions including, Grafton Tyler Brown: Exploring California, (2018) (Pasadena Museum of California Art; Ernie Barnes: A Retrospective at the California African American Museum (2019) (CAAM) and the nationally touring exhibition The Black Index. She is author of the book Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011). Some of her other publications can be found in Afterall, Afterimage, American Studies, Aperture, and American Quarterly.

Robert Cozzolino is the Patrick and Aimee Butler Curator of Paintings at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Some have called him the “curator of the dispossessed” for championing underrepresented artists and uncommon perspectives on well-known figures. He has curated over sixty exhibitions, including Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art, World War I and American Art, Peter Blume: Nature and Metamorphosis, David Lynch: The Unified Field, and The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making Their World. His writing appears in a wide range of publications, including essays on artists such as Harriet Bart, Jim Denomie, Sylvia Fein, Henry Koerner, George Morrison, Elizabeth Osborne, Faith Ringgold, Peter Saul, Honoré Sharrer, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Bob Thompson, George Tooker, Ray Yoshida, Dyani White Hawk, and John Wilde. Originally trained as a musician, he has played free-improvised music as a percussionist since 1993. Learn more about Robert Cozzolino’s work.

MODERATOR

Sika Bonsu is a Ghanaian photographer whose work explores the depth of Black life and identity. Bonsu focuses on the natural order of things around her to emphasize an anti-elitist, anti-colorist celebration of everyday blackness. She now works as a museum assistant at The Phillips Collection, assisting with everyday operations.