Nichols Trustees Suite
Free with museum admission, ticket required*

Columbia University professor Kellie Jones, an art historian, curator, and 2016 MacArthur Fellow, speaks about her new book, South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s, and current projects, with SAIC professor Romi Crawford.

Presented with emerge: journal of arts administration and policy, MA Department Arts Administration and Policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

*Museum admission is free for Illinois residents every Thursday, 5:00–8:00—including during this event.

About the Speakers:

Dr. Kellie Jones is Associate Professor in Art History and Archaeology and the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University. Her research interests include African American and African Diaspora artists, Latinx and Latin American Artists, and issues in contemporary art and museum theory. Jones has received numerous awards for her work from the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University; Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a term as Scholar-in-Residence at the Terra Foundation for American Art in Europe in Giverny, France. In 2016 she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. Her writings have appeared in exhibition catalogues and such journals as NKA, Artforum, Flash Art, Atlantica, and Third Text. She is the author of two books published by Duke University Press, EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (2011), and South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (2017). Dr. Jones has also worked as a curator for over three decades and has numerous major national and international exhibitions to her credit. Her exhibition Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980, at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, was named one of the best exhibitions of 2011 and 2012 by Artforum, and best thematic show nationally by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). She was co-curator of Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the 1960s (Brooklyn Museum), named one the best exhibitions of 2014 by Artforum.

Romi Crawford (Ph.D.) is Associate Professor in the Visual and Critical Studies and Liberal Arts Departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her research revolves primarily around formations of racial and gendered identity and the relation to American visual arts, film, and popular culture. Recent curatorial projects include The Wall of Respect; Vestiges, Shards, and the Legacy of Black Power, presently on display at The Chicago Cultural Center and Radical Relations!: Memory, Objects and the Generation of the Political, at The University of Chicago Center for Gender Studies. She makes regular contributions to publications on African American art and culture; including, Theaster Gates, Black Archive (Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2017); Do For Self: The AACM and the Chicago Style in Support Networks (Abigail Satinsky, ed. University of Chicago Press, 2014); and Ebony and Jet On Our Minds. . . In Our Homes. . . On the Wall in Speaking of People: Ebony, Jet and Contemporary Art (Lauren Haynes, ed., Studio Museum in Harlem, 2014). She is co-author with Abdul Alkalimat and Rebecca Zorach of The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago (Northwestern University Press, 2017). In 2016 She founded the Museum of Vernacular Arts, a project based platform for art forms that are part of everyday experience. Crawford was co-curator with Lisa Lee of the 2017 Open Engagement Conference, themed “Justice.”

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Tags: Chicago, Kellie Jones, Loop, Romi Crawford, The Art Institute of Chicago