HomeFriday, April 10th
Saturday, April 11th
10 AM - 5 PM
Linsly-Chittenden Hall, 102
63 High Street
Organized by
Meleko Mokgosi, Painting/Printmaking, Yale University
Michael Kelly, Philosophy, UNC Charlotte + Transdisciplinary Aesthetics Foundation
Sponsored by the Yale University School of Art, Whitney Humanities Center, Council on African Studies, American Studies, Black Studies, Department of Art History, the Native-American Cultural Center, and the Transdisciplinary
Aesthetics Foundation.
Neal Ambrose-Smith
Painter, sculptor, printmaker, photographer, musician, educator
Neal Ambrose-Smith is a painter, sculptor, printmaker, photographer, musician, and educator. Based in Corrales, New Mexico, he is a descendent of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation. Painter, sculptor, printmaker, photographer, musician, and educator, he formerly served as professor and department chair at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Threaded throughout his technically skilled work is an intensely personal maximalist reflection on contemporary culture, politics, and society. Borrowing from the strategies of postmodern collage, his work juxtaposes Native motifs, passages of gestural abstraction, and mass media imagery lifted from vintage comic books, clip art, and television screens. A rotating cast of characters—from Batman and Darth Vader to the Coyote trickster—act as allegorical ciphers, sardonically evoking themes of racism, environmental destruction, and the legacy of colonialism. Beginning in the 1990s, Ambrose-Smith collaborated with his mother, the internationally recognized Native artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, on several significant sculptures and exhibitions. He has also developed an app, Artist Ideas, designed to stimulate creative thinking. Ambrose-Smith’s work is featured in the collections of many major museums, including the Boise Art Museum; Denver Art Museum; Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis; Flint Institute of Arts; Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe; Library of Congress, Washington DC; Minneapolis Institute of Arts; New York Public Library; Salish Kootenai College, Pablo, Montana; School of Art Institute, Chicago; University of Colorado, Boulder; University of Nevada, Reno; Whitney Museum of American Art.
Tarren Andrews
Assistant Professor in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration
Tarren Andrews is Assistant Professor in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She has graduate certificates in Native American and Indigenous Studies; Culture, Language, and Social Practice; and College Teaching. Her scholarship employs critical Indigenous studies to re-evaluate and re-narrativize stories of the early medieval North Atlantic (pre-1100). Her forthcoming book takes a transtemporal approach to law and literature, re-examining legal and literary artifacts from the early medieval North Atlantic—like the Domesday Book (England, ca. 1085), the Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum (England, ca. 878), and the Old English poem The Wife’s Lament (ca. 10th century)—alongside resonant documents and stories from Turtle Island (North America) including the Dawes Act of 1887, the Hellgate Treaty of 1859, and the Canadian Indian Act of 1876. This work seeks to find origins of Anglophone settler colonial logics as they are manifested in U.S. and Canadian settler law to better understand how we might imagine anticolonial futures.
Links
Poetry
Pedagogy
Jennifer Devere Brody
Professor of Theater and Performance Studies and, by courtesy, of African and African American Studies
Brody (she/her) holds a B.A. in Victorian Studies from Vassar College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English and American Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Her scholarship and service in African and African American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, visual and performance studies have been recognized by numerous awards: a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2023 Virginia Howard Fellowship from the Bogliasco Foundation, support from the Mellon and Ford Foundations, the Monette-Horwitz Prize for Independent Research Against Homophobia, the Royal Society for Theatre Research, and the Thurgood Marshall Prize for Academics and Community Service among others. Her scholarly essays have appeared in Theatre Journal, Signs, Genders, Callaloo, Screen, Text and Performance Quarterly and other journals as well as in numerous edited volumes. Her books include: Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity and Victorian Culture (Duke University Press, 1998), Punctuation: Art, Politics and Play (Duke University Press, 2008) and Moving Stones: About the Art of Edmonia Lewis(forthcoming from Duke University Press). She has served as the President of the Women and Theatre Program, on the board of Women and Performance and has worked with the Ford and Mellon Foundations. She co-produced “The Theme is Blackness” festival of black plays in Durham, NC when she taught in African American Studies at Duke University. Her research and teaching focus on performance, aesthetics, politics as well as black feminist theory, black queer studies and contemporary cultural studies. She co-edited, with Nicholas Boggs, the re-publication of James Baldwin’s illustrated book, Little Man, Little Man (Duke UP, 2018). She held the Weinberg College of Board of Visitors Professorship at Northwestern University and has been a tenured professor at six different universities in her thirty year career. Her expertise in Queer Studies fostered her work as co-editor ,with C. Riley Snorton, of the flagship journal GLQ. She serves on the Editorial Board of Transition and key journals in global 19th Century Studies. At Stanford, she served as Chair of the Theater & Performance Studies Department (2012-2015) and Faculty Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity (2016-2021) where she won a major grant from the Mellon Foundation and developed the original idea for an Institute on Race Studies.
Links
Columbia University School of the Arts Lecture
Antawan I. Byrd
Art historian and curator
Assistant professor of art history at Northwestern UniversityFaculty affiliate of Northwestern’s Program of African StudiesAntawan I. Byrd is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Northwestern University and an Associate Curator of Photography and Media at the Art Institute of Chicago. His research and teaching focus on the art and culture of Africa and the African diaspora from the late nineteenth century to the present. He recently co-curated Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica (2024–2026), a major survey exhibition examining Pan-Africanism’s influence on culture throughout the long twentieth century. The exhibition opened at the Art Institute of Chicago in December 2024, traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona in November 2025, and will open at the Barbican Art Centre, London in June 2026. He curated Mimi Cherono Ng’ok: Closer to the Earth, Closer to My Own Body (2021) and co-curated The People Shall Govern! Medu Art Ensemble and the Anti-Apartheid Poster(2019), the 2nd Lagos Biennial of Contemporary Art (2019), and Kader Attia: Reflecting Memory at Northwestern’s Block Museum of Art (2017). He was an associate curator for the 10th Bamako Encounters: Biennale of African Photography (2015). In 2017, he received the Award for Curatorial Excellence from the Arts Council of the African Studies Association. From 2009 to 2011, he was a Fulbright Fellow and curatorial assistant at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, where he currently serves on the board of advisors. He is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the Graham Foundation, Chicago. Byrd is currently working on Being Seen Listening: Art, Pan-Africanism, and the Sound Politics of the Sixties, a book-length study examining the impact of sound technologies on art and decolonial politics across Africa and its diaspora.
Akeia de Barros Gomes
Director of the Edward W. Kane and Martha J. Wallace Center for Black History at the Newport Historical SocietyVisiting Scholar & Adjunct Lecturer at The Ruth J. Simmons Center for Slavery and Justice, Brown University
She is the Director of the Edward W. Kane and Martha J. Wallace Center for Black History at the Newport Historical Society. She is a Visiting Scholar & Adjunct Lecturer at The Ruth J. Simmons Center for Slavery and Justice, Brown University. At Mystic Seaport Museum she served as Senior Curator of Maritime Social Histories, Vice Pres. American Institute for Maritime Studies, and Dir. of Munson Institute. As an anthropologist and archaeologist her research has been extensive on many continents. Her recent exhibition, Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty and the Sea is a multi-year Mellon Foundation-funded project that recovers the history of the founding and development of the Dawnland (New England) through Indigenous, African, and African-descended maritime perspectives. This project is a cooperative effort with individuals in Dawnland Indigenous, African, and African-descended communities. Akeia taught as professor of American Studies and Professor of Psychology and Human Development at Wheelock College from 2008 to 2017.
Links
Nkisi (Article)
Tomaquag Museum Lecture
Robert Gooding-Williams
Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Philosophy at Yale University
Robert Gooding-Williams is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Over the course of his career, he has taught at Simmons College, Amherst College, Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, and Columbia University. Gooding-Williams is the author of Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism (Stanford, 2001), Look, A Negro!: Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture, and Politics (Routledge, 2005), and In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America (Harvard, 2009). His Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures, Democracy and Beauty: The Political Aesthetics of W.E.B. Du Bois, was published by Columbia University Press in the spring of 2025. Gooding-Williams was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018 and in 2020 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2023, the Yale GSAS Alumni Association awarded him the Wilbur Cross Medal, the highest honor that GSAS bestows on alumni. Gooding-Williams received both his BA (1975) and his PhD (1982) from Yale. He is also the organizer of the Philosophy Department’s Political Philosophy and Race Speaker Series.
Links
W. E. B. Du Bois Lecture
Steffani Jemison
Artist and Associate Professor in Art and Design at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University
Steffani Jemison is a Brooklyn-based artist; and Associate Professor in Art and Design at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. Her multidisciplinary approach spans time-based, sculptural, and discursive mediums, informed by deep research into movement practices, literature, ethnomusicology, and the history of cinema. A 2020 recipient of a Creative Capital Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors, her recent work examines the liberatory potential of opacity and quiet. Calligraphic drawings on clear film or tempered glass suggest an unreadable language, amplifying what she calls the “tensions between what can be read, what can be intuited, and what refuses to give up its secrets.” Mining the Black vernacular tradition of encrypting what cannot be said, Jemison looks to the archive for alternative genealogies of mark-making that sidestep the modernist narrative. Her work is currently on view in the newly renovated Studio Museum in Harlem through August 16, 2026, and a solo exhibition of her work will open at Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster on June 27. Solo exhibitions, screenings, and performances include Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2025–26); Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford (2025); Galeria Madragoa, Lisbon (2025; 2021); Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2024); Greene Naftali, New York (2024, 2021); JOAN, Los Angeles (2022); Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam (2022, 2020); Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati (2021); Kai Matsumiya, New York (2019); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2019); Lincoln Center, New York (2018); Jeu de Paume, Paris (2017); CAPC Bordeaux (2017); MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (2017); Nottingham Contemporary (2017); RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island (2015); and The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2015). Notable group exhibitions include Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2024–25); Counterpublic, St. Louis (2023); A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration, organized by the Mississippi Museum of Art and Baltimore Museum of Art (travelling 2022–24); Greater New York, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York (2021); Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem, organized by The Studio Museum in Harlem and The American Federation for Arts (travelled 2019–21); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2019). Jemison is Associate Professor of Art & Design at Rutgers University; her first novel, A Rock, A River, A Street, was published by Primary Information in 2022.
Dr. Courtney Lewis
Crandall Family Associate Professor, Department of Cultural Anthropology and Founding Director, RISE-US: Research for Indigenous Studies & Engagement in the US, Duke University
Cherokee Nation citizen
Associate Professor Courtney Lewis (Ph.D., UNC Chapel Hill, 2012) is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, and has established herself as a rising star in Native American Studies as well as a dynamic program builder. Her research explores the themes of American Indian sovereignty, economic justice, and the ethnography of Native Nation capitalism, focusing on small businesses in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indian’s Qualla Boundary in the North Carolina mountains. By contrast to the feathers-and-beads mythologies of Native peoples as stuck in a buffalo-hunting time-warp and, conversely, racist tropes about them as lazy dependents of the government, Lewis shows how Cherokee business owners struggle with factors general to capitalist America and specific to American Indian experiences to make their way forward. She brings her economics background to the task, combining a careful eye for cultural processes with an attentiveness to markets and capital. Her prize-winning book, “Sovereign Entrepreneurs: Cherokee Small-Business owners and the Making of Economic Sovereignty” is driven by a powerful sense of moral as well as scholarly engagement with issues of social justice and Native sovereignty insofar as developing tribal businesses is a key aspect of 21st century American Indian life. The book is regarded as one of the most original anthropology books about Native America today. Dr. Lewis’ developing research addresses American Indian food sovereignty.
Links
Interview
American Indians Go Graphic Exhibition
Tavia Nyong’o
William Lampson Professor of American Studies; Black Studies; Performance Studies; and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies
William Lampson Professor of American Studies; Black Studies; Performance Studies; and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. Tavia Nyong’o studies Black queer performance, speculative aesthetics, and affective historiography. He is the author of The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) and Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (New York University Press, 2018). He co-edited José Esteban Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown (Duke University Press, 2020) with Joshua Chambers-Letson. His current work spans the performative turn in museum practice, the re-examination of “race” and racism in performance and aesthetics, racial and sexual dissidence in art, and the self-conscious end of unaugmented thought. A 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, Nyong’o is the author of Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World (University of California Press, 2025), which reframes the binary of afropessimism and afrofuturism to explore Black speculative thought at the edge of planetary crisis. He continues work on two additional books: a cultural history of race, sex, and gender in postwar Downtown New York, and a public-facing study of the racial reckoning in contemporary art and performance. A member of the Practicing Refusal Collective, Nyong’o has participated in the Sojourner Project, an international mobile Black Studies academy that convenes transnational dialogues on blackness, anti-black violence, and Black futurity. He curates public programs at the Park Avenue Armory (since 2021) and has written widely in arts and culture publications. Nyong’o serves as editor-at-large of Social Text, sits on the editorial boards of TDR, Theatre, and Contemporary Theatre Review, and co-edits NYU Press’s Sexual Cultures series (with Ann Pellegrini and Joshua Chambers-Letson).
Links
Afro-Fabulations Interview
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Lecture
Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi
Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA, New York
Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA, New York. Smooth Nzewi joined The Museum of Modern Art in July 2019 as the first Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture. He leads the Africa group in the Museum’s Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP), MoMA’s internal research and exchange initiative devoted to art in a global context. His projects at MoMA include the exhibition Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World Unbound (2022). Prior to joining MoMA, Nzewi was Curator of African Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art (2017–19), where he organized Second Careers: Two Tributaries in African Art (2020) and co-organized Ama: The Gathering Place (2019). Before Cleveland, Nzewi was Curator of African Art at Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum (2013–17). There, his exhibitions included Inventory: New Works and Conversations around African Art (2016), and he spearheaded the acquisition of works by artists such as Kader Attia, Candice Brietz, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Julie Mehretu, and Obiora Udechukwu. Nzewi holds a PhD in art history from Emory University. As an artist, he has exhibited internationally and is represented in public and private collections including the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC, and Newark Museum, New Jersey.
Links
MoMA
Field Journal Interview
Professor, Department of Rhetoric, UC Berkeley
Fumi Okiji is Professor, Department of Rhetoric, UC Berkeley. She arrived at the academy by way of the London jazz scene in which she took an active part as a vocalist and improvisor. She works across black study, critical theory, and sound and music studies. Her research and teaching looks to black expression for ways to understand modern and contemporary life, which is to say, she explores works and practices for what they can provide by way of social theory. Her book Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited (Stanford University Press, 2018) is a sustained engagement with Theodor Adorno’s and the critical potential of art. She proposes that the socio-musical play of jazz is not representative of the individualistic and democratic values the music is most readily associated with. The book centers blackness as a more appropriate analytic through which to understand its social significance. Deepening the engagement established in her first book, her recent book, Billie’s Bent Elbow: Exorbitance, Intimacy and a Nonsensuous Standard (Stanford University Press, 2025), considers black life as a mode of living with a markedly distinct relationship to contradiction, disorder, and fantastic possibility. In augmentation of conversations taking place in black theory—and drawing from Adorno and Walter Benjamin on aesthetics, music, dialectics, mimesis, as well as Yorùbá aesthetics—the work explores the modal anomaly of black life, and its subjunctive comportment. Music from Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry, Nina Simone, among others, not so much provide examples as further avenues of theoretical resources.
Jami Powell
Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Indigenous Art at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth CollegeSenior lecturer in the Native American and Indigenous Studies Department
Jami Powell (she/her) is the Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Indigenous Art at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College where she also serves as a senior lecturer in the Native American and Indigenous Studies Department. Powell is a citizen of the Osage Nation and has a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. During her tenure at the Hood Museum, Powell has curated exhibitions including Form and Relation: Contemporary Native American Ceramics, CIPX Dartmouth with Kali Spitzer and Will Wilson, Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Bark Painting from Yirrkala, and This Land: American Engagement with the Natural World among others. Powell's co-edited volume titled Re-Envisioning American Art: Transforming Museum Practice was published by the University of Washington Press in 2025. She is on the board of directors for the Native American Art Studies Association and has served in advisory roles for numerous museums, arts organizations, and publications. Most recently, Powell curated Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light), the first solo exhibition for Chemehuevi photographer and artist Cara Romero which was accompanied by a catalogue co-published by Radius Books and the Hood Museum of Art. The exhibition is currently on a national tour, opening at the Phoenix Art Museum in February 2026.
Links
Harvard Art Museum Lecture
Alexis Salas
Endowed Assistant Professor of Arts of the Americas, Latin American and U.S. Diasporic Latin Art History, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville 2026-2027
Dr. Alexis Salas specializes in Latin American and Latino/a/e/x art and visual culture. Dr. Salas holds the position of Endowed Assistant Professor of arts in the Americas in art history at the University of Arkansas. During the 2024-25 academic year Salas was the Terra Visiting Professor at Freie Universitat in Berlin, Germany. She also curates and works with contemporary artists and in arts advocacy. Her creative, research, and teaching interests explore fine art, visual, and material culture with emphasis on voices of people of color as well as feminist and queer critique. Salas is a recipient of the Terra Visiting Professorship, Jacob Javits Fellowship, Fulbright Fellowship at Universidad Iberoamericana and UNAM, and DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst) Fellowship, among others. During the 2026-27 academic year Salas will be the Faculty Fellow at the Centre of Latin American Studies and Lucy Cavendish College at Cambridge University. She is currently at work on three book length projects: Queer Latinx Art and Activism, ¡Dále Gas! [Give it Gas!]: Art and Oil in the Petrochemical Americas, and Disparity at Play: The Artists and Projects of Temístocles 44 (Mexico City, 1991-2003).
Links
The National Coalition Against Censorship
Anna Tsouhlarakis
Visual Artist, + Associate Professor of Art and Art History Department, University of Colorado, Boulder
Anna Tsouhlarakis works in sculpture, installation, video, and performance. She received her BA from Dartmouth College with degrees in Native American Studies and Studio Art. She went on to receive her MFA from Yale University in Sculpture. Her work has been part of national and international exhibitions at venues such as NEON Foundation in Athens, Greece; White Frame in Basel, Switzerland; the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto; the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts; the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art; the National Museum of the American Indian; the National Portrait Gallery; the Ford Foundation Gallery; and a solo exhibition at MCA Denver. In the coming year, she will be in the 2026 Whitney Biennial. Tsouhlarakis has participated in various art residencies including Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Yaddo, MacDowell, and was the Andrew W. Mellon Artist-in-Residence at Colorado College for the 2019-2020 academic year. She was awarded a Creative Capital Grant in 2021, received a 2022 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, was a 2025 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow and in the summer of 2025, she returned to Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture as Resident Faculty. In the Spring of 2026, Tsouhlarakis is Artist in Residence at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture. Tsouhlarakis is of Greek descent and an enrolled citizen of the Navajo Nation.
Links
Museum of Contemporary Art Denver Lecture
Marina Tyquiengco
Independent curator and art historianTyquiengco is a scholar of global Indigenous art with an emphasis on Indigenous American art and Indigenous Australian art. She worked at the MFA Boston from 2020 until 2026, where she was the inaugural associate curator of Native American art. At the MFA, she was a member of the curatorial team responsible for the forthcoming reinstallation of the 18th century floor on the Art of Americas wing and a co-author of the forthcoming book on the project. She co-curated multiple projects including Alan Michelson’s The Knowledge Keepers, two exhibitions of Indigenous American prints with Edward Saywell and Duane Slick, and Garden for Boston, a project led by artists and activists Ekua Holmes (African American, born 1955) and Elizabeth James-Perry (Aquinnah Wampanoag, born 1973). Tyquiengco received her doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh, where her dissertation focused on contemporary Indigenous artists. She has taught at Brown University and the University of Pittsburgh. Her publications include articles in Feminist Studies, Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, and Panorama: Journal of the Association of American Art.
Links
Beyond Land Acknowledgements
© Questioning Aesthetics Symposium