February 22, 2007

Conference explores images, memory of slavery

When it comes to raising the ghosts of slavery, few artists are as well known or adept as MacArthur “genius” award-winner Fred Wilson. At a major international conference marking the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, Wilson will deliver the keynote address and Leon Forrest Lecture.

An artist whose provocative works have juxtaposed metal slave shackles with silver tea services and finely carved period furniture with rough hewn whipping posts, Wilson will join other leading artists, art historians, museum curators and scholars of slavery at Northwestern for “Out of Sight: New World Slavery and the Visual Imagination” on Friday, March 2, and Saturday, March 3.

“The conference will explore the ways that visual representations of slavery and — often more important — the absence of these images influence our understanding and memory of slavery,” says Northwestern art historian Huey Copeland. It will take place at the Block Museum of Art, beginning at 9:30 a.m. both Friday and Saturday. Wilson will speak Friday at 4:30 p.m. An online multi-media artwork about Chicago’s slavery disclosure ordinance will officially debut at the conference.

“The slavery experience in the modern Americas is often described as ‘unrepresentable,’ a kind of a visual blind spot in the memory of the African Diaspora,” says Copeland, assistant professor of art history at Northwestern.

Exploring slavery and its representations head-on are artists Mendi+Keith Obadike whose online work, “Big House/Disclosure,” will officially launch at the conference. The digital artwork examines issues surrounding and reaction to Chicago’s Slavery-Era Disclosure Ordinance. The ordinance requires that institutions doing business with Chicago disclose whether they have profited from slavery.

“Big House” was made in collaboration with Northwestern students, staff and faculty. Conceputal artists Mendi+Keith — who in 2001 put up Keith’s blackness for sale on e-Bay in a work about ownership and blackness — will take part in a Saturday (March 3) conference session on slavery in popular culture and contemporary art.

Among conference participants are Marcus Wood, author of the groundbreaking book “Blind Memory;” artist Christopher Cozier, whose work rejects stereotypical sunny images of his native Trinidad to examine its historic role in the slave trade; Hank Willis Thomas, whose photographs in “Branded” included digitally added, scar-like Nike logos to the head, chest and other body parts of a black male model; and Saidya V. Hartman, author of “Scenes of Subjection” and “Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route.”