In conjunction with the exhibition Garrett Bradley: American Rhapsody and the release of the accompanying publication, join CAMH Curator Rebecca Matalon in conversation with art historian and catalogue contributor Huey Copeland. Copeland, Associate Professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, has published numerous books and articles focusing on blackness and black visuality in the field of art. His rigorous and incisive examinations of the work of artists—such as Renee Green, Arthur Jafa, Glenn Ligon, and Lorna Simpson, among many others—are essential contributions to narratives of artmaking in, and about, the “afterlife of slavery.”
Copeland and Matalon will discuss Bradley’s work and the ways it might be seen to participate in, push against, and reframe traditional filmic structures, while also examining her relationship to what Copeland has termed “black auto-citational practice,” a mode of working in relation to one’s own history of production. This event also marks the release of the exhibition catalogue for Garrett Bradley: American Rhapsody, which features an essay by Matalon and a newly commissioned conversation between Copeland and Bradley.
About Huey Copeland
Huey Copeland is an art historian, critic, teacher, administrator, and occasional curator based in Chicago, Illinois. Currently, he is Arthur Andersen Teaching and Research Professor and Associate Professor of Art History at Northwestern University, where he also enjoys affiliations with African American Studies, Art Theory & Practice, Critical Theory, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Performance Studies. His writing focuses on modern and contemporary transatlantic art with an emphasis on articulations of blackness in the Western visual field. A Contributing Editor of Artforum, Copeland has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals as well as in numerous international exhibition catalogues and essay collections. Most notable among his publications is Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America, a book published in 2013 by the University of Chicago Press. At present, Copeland is at work on two complementary volumes: In the Shadow of the Negress: Modern Art in the Transatlantic World, which explores the constitutive role played by fictions of black womanhood in Western art from the late 18th century to the present, and Touched by the Mother: On Black Men, Artistic Practice, and Other Feminist Horizons, 1966–2016, which brings together a selection of his critical essays.
