Join Sanford Biggers, a Harlem-based artist, whose work speaks to current social, political and economic happening, and visual culture theorist Leigh Raiford, in a conversation about art, materiality, violence, and possibility.
This event is part of the Institute of the Arts and Science's Visualizing Abolition series and The Humanities Institute's yearlong theme, Memory.
FREE and open to the public
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About the Speakers
Sanford Biggers’ work is an interplay of narrative, perspective, and history that speaks to current social, political and economic happenings and the contexts that bore them. His diverse practice positions him as a collaborator with the past through explorations of often overlooked cultural and political narratives from American history. Biggers has exhibited work in galleries including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Leigh Raiford is an associate professor of African American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches and researches about race, gender, justice and visuality. She also serves as affiliate faculty in the Program in American Studies, and the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies.
Raiford received her Ph.D. from Yale University’s joint program in African American studies and American studies in 2003. Raiford is the author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (University of North Carolina Press, 2011), which was a finalist for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Best Book Prize. Her work has appeared in numerous academic journals and periodicals, including American Quarterly, Small Axe, Qui Parle, History and Theory, English Language Notes, and NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Artforum, Aperture, Ms. Magazine, The Atlantic and Al-Jazeera.
About the Series
Visualizing Abolition is a series of online events organized by Dr. Rachel Nelson, director of the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, and Gina Dent, associate professor of feminist studies. The events feature artists, activists, and scholars united by their commitment to the vital struggle for prison abolition. Originally, Visualizing Abolition was being planned as an in-person symposium. Due to the ongoing pandemic, the panels, artist talks, film screenings, and other events will instead take place online. The events accompany Barring Freedom, an exhibition of contemporary art on view at San José Museum of Art October 30, 2020–April 25, 2021. To accompany the exhibition, Solitary Garden, a public art project about mass incarceration and solitary confinement is on view at UC Santa Cruz.
Visualizing Abolition is organized by UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences in collaboration with San José Museum of Art and Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery. The series has been generously funded by the Nion McEvoy Family Trust, Ford Foundation, Future Justice Fund, Wanda Kownacki, Peter Coha, James L. Gunderson, Rowland and Pat Rebele, Porter College, UCSC Foundation, and annual donors to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences.
Partners include: Howard University School of Law, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Jessica Silverman Gallery, Indexical, The Humanities Institute, University Library, University Relations, Institute for Social Transformation, Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, Porter College, the Center for Cultural Studies, the Center for Creative Ecologies, and Media and Society, Kresge College.
image: Sanford Biggers