First Exposure Symposium at Northeastern University, Friday, April 26, 2013

I am very excited about presenting another installment on my ruminations on FUNK at the inaugural symposium of First Exposure, the culmination of a full academic year of reading, meeting, and discussing scholarship in The Dark Room: A Faculty Seminar on Race and Visual Culture, primarily convened at Northeastern University through the rigorous efforts of Assistant Professor of English, Kimberly Juanita Brown. My paper is titled, “Personifying Funk: Lessons Learned from Adrian Piper and Renée Stout,” wherein I will discuss how both artists embodied funk, physically and philosophically in such a way as to resist the limitations of the “triple negation of colored women artists.” I will consider Piper’s Funk Lessons and Renée Stout’s Fetish #2 and her personas, in particular.

There are so many brilliant topics by scholars from across the country with keynote addresses by María Magdalena Campos-Pons and Saidiya Hartman. This symposium will be invigorating and enlightening…