Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge Lecture: Anna Arabindan-Kesson

This event requires registration; see further details below.

Join us for a discussion with Anna Arabindan-Kesson, from Princeton University, about some of the artistic networks and aesthetic imaginaries among African-diasporic artists and makers throughout the Americas from the 18th through the 19th century.

Speaker:
Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Associate Professor of African American and Black Diasporic Art with a joint appointment in the Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University

Anna Arabindan-Kesson (she/her) is an immigrant writer, scholar, and curator. Her work generally engages with the intersections of race, labor, migration, and medicine in the visual and material culture of communities across the Black diaspora and the former British Empire. She serves as the director of Art Hx, a digital humanities project and object database that addresses the intersections of art, race, and medicine in the British Empire. Her first book, Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World (Duke University Press, 2021), looks to the commodity of cotton, central to the slave trade and colonialism, as a focus for new interpretations of the way art, commerce, and colonialism were intertwined in the 19th-century Atlantic World.

Free admission, but seating is limited, and registration is required. You can register by clicking on the event on this form, beginning Sunday, September 29, after 10am.

The lecture will take place in Menschel Hall, Lower Level. Doors will open for seating at 5:30pm.

Limited complimentary parking is available in the Broadway Garage, 7 Felton Street, Cambridge.

This lecture will be recorded and made available for online viewing; check back shortly after the event for the link to view.

The Harvard Art Museums offer free admission every day, Tuesday through Sunday. Please see the museum visit page to learn about our general policies for visiting the museums.

Support for this lecture is provided by the Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge Fund for American Art. The biannual Coolidge Lecture honors a distinguished womxn-femme artist or scholar whose work is transforming the definition of American art.

The Harvard Art Museums are committed to accessibility for all visitors. For anyone requiring accessibility accommodations for our programs, please contact us at am_register@harvard.edu at least 48 hours in advance.