[CANCELED] Imperiled but not Invisible: Memory, Resistance and Art

In the final session of the yearlong interdisciplinary John F. Sawyer Seminar, hosted by Anita Hill, Rose Art Museum director and chief curator Gannit Ankori, and Faith Smith, Marta F. Kauffman ‘78 Professor of African and African American Studies, will moderate a conversation with artist Renee Cox and scholar Elyan J. Hill about artworks on view in the museum. Topics addressed relate to gender-based violence, beginning with the transatlantic slave trade and continuing to this day. The museum will be open before and during the program.

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

Renee Cox (b. 1960, Jamaica) is a photographer and activist whose provocative portraits employ alter-egos that celebrate Black womanhood and combat racist, sexist stereotypes. Cox transforms herself into superheroine Raje, Yo Mama’s modern Madonna, and the 18th-Century Jamaican national hero Queen Nanny of the Maroons. Working both digitally and from archives, Cox’s work continues to explore new ways to empower imperiled bodies: "It's about time that we re-imagine our own constitutions.

Elyan J. Hill is an assistant professor of African and African Diaspora art history at the Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University. She received her Ph.D. in world arts and cultures/dance from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). As an interdisciplinary scholar of African arts, her research interests include festival arts, religious materiality, Black feminisms, and embodied renderings of the domestic and transatlantic slave trades in Ghana, Togo, Benin, Liberia and their diasporas. Her work with Dr. Gannit Ankori on re: collections, Six decades at the Rose Art Museum focused on contemporary African American artists, who address racist histories, experiences, and stereotypes.

Faith Smith is the chair of the Department of African and African American Studies at Brandeis University. She is also a Professor of English, Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation Program (CAST), Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is the author of Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean’s Non-sovereign Modern in the Early Twentieth-Century Caribbean (Duke University Press, 2023). A new project, “DreadKin,” focuses on contemporary literary and visual culture. 

Events in the yearlong Mellon Sawyer seminar series, “Imperiled Bodies: Slavery, Colonialism, Citizenship and the Logics of Gender-Based Violence” are sponsored by a prestigious John E. Sawyer Seminar grant from the Mellon Foundation that is led by PI Anita Hill (Heller School for Social Policy and Management), co-PI Harleen Singh (Senior Associate Provost for Faculty & Global Affairs, Director of the Women’s Studies Research Center, and Associate Professor of Literature and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies), and ChaeRan Freeze (Frances and Max Elkon Chair in Modern Jewish History and Chair of the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies).

Brandeis sponsors and resources include the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Women’s Studies Research Center,  Mandel Center for the Humanities, Hadassah Brandeis Institute, Feminist Sexual Ethics Project, Rose Art Museum, Kniznick Art Gallery, Gender and Sexuality Center, and the Prevention, Advocacy, and Resource Center.