AICA-USA Lecture, Lecture

Art historian and curator Dr. Kellie Jones delivers the 19th annual AICA-USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School, presented in partnership with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. In this lecture, Jones reflects on the theoretical legacy and cultural production of Black women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, raising questions of intellectual lineage and material knowledge.

Scholar Brittney Cooper has argued that the best way to honor Black women’s intellectual and cultural production is not simply to admire and revere them but to dive into and sit with their work. And while we may not always agree with these figures, we need to trust them and take their theoretical imaginations seriously.

Jones extends this framing of trust, of sitting with the work, to a discussion of knowledge as a material entity, as something tangible. She engages with Cooper’s idea of “embodied discourse,” Black women centering the experiences of Black (primarily working class) women, as the basis of social thought. Intersecting identities (of gender and blackness) are not viewed as a burden but as energizing forces that open up possibilities for greater social and public responsibility and engagement, as well as hope. 

Historically, women’s thought has been overlooked. Yet it often does come into view later, often as organic intelligence or ascribed to others. Referencing scholars such as Julia Bryan-Wilson, Lisa Farrington, Linda Nochlin, and Deborah Willis, Jones asks: What would the long arc of art history look like through the lens of women’s lives? In this light, how does what we know now and how we know it differ today? In what ways does that take into our future?