The Group for the Intellectual Life of the Department (GILD) routinely invites emerging scholars to give a lecture highlighting new directions in art history.
Black Conceptual Practice Systems, and Marginal Possibility
In this talk, Dr. Tani shares ideas from her current book projects on the topic of African American conceptual art practices of the 1970s, focusing on the work of Charles Gaines, Senga Nengudi and other avant-garde peers who understood race as the ultimate conceptualism, and the black body itself as a conceptually loaded material that negates “neutral” systems. Black conceptual practice foregrounds process and indeterminacy as resistive tactics to the logical systems that structure Western epistemology. Dr. Tani will explore artists’ shared investments in questions of representation that perplex disciplinary methods of art history, approaching matters of obfuscation, incommensurability, and fugitivity as generative conditions.
Bio:
Ellen Tani is an art historian, curator and critic who explores the histories of American art and contemporary art through a critical race studies lens, with a focus on Black conceptual practice. Her research has been supported by the Clark Art Institute, Getty Research Institute, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and her writing appears in Art Journal and Artforum, among other outlets. Tani is currently Assistant Professor of Art History at Rochester Institute of Technology. After receiving her PhD from Stanford University, she worked as a curator at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and the ICA Boston. In 2023, she co-curated RETROaction with Charles Gaines, who is also the subject of her current book.
This event is open and free to the public.
If you require accommodation such as live captioning or interpretation to participate in this event, please contact Allison Buenger at buenger.2@osu.edu. Requests made two weeks before the event will generally allow us to provide seamless access, but the university will make every effort to meet requests made after this date.
