Otis College of Art and Design's Undergraduate Fine Arts Department presents the Mandy & Cliff Einstein Visiting Artist Series speaker and Visiting Critic for Spring 2020: Fred Moten.
The Critic-in-Residence position in the Fine Arts Department at Otis has been in existence for 18 years. Each year, an outstanding critic is invited to be in residence, give a public lecture, and engage with students individually.
"Blue(s) as Cymbal: Beauford Delaney (Elvin Jones) James Baldwin” is concerned with two questions: Does the field of immersion that exists in which the resonant localities of Baldwin’s writing (whose particular refusal of the opposition or relation between fiction and nonfiction might be said to fail to achieve and succeed in avoiding narrative), and Delaney’s painting (where the field of color is a zone of refusal of the opposition and relation of figuration and abstraction upon which portraiture can be said to be based) allow something else of blackness to show up beyond the triangular nexus of personhood, narrative, and portrait? Is it possible that this largesse becomes sensible for us in and through the deep, both sub- and super-philosophical and synaesthetic nonsense of the great drummer Elvin Jones’s theory of musical color?
Fred Moten is a Professor in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Before joining Tisch in Fall 2017, Moten was a Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, as well as Professor of Modern Poetry at Duke University. In 2012 he was the Whitney J. Oates Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University, and also a faculty member of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College.
Moten obtained his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and his PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests revolve around performance studies, black studies, poetics, literary theory, critical theory, and the relationship between social movements and art. He explored these fields of interest both by poetry and criticism.
There will be a public reception for Fred Moten at 6:30 p.m. in the Galef lobby. The talk will follow at 7:30 p.m. in the Forum.
