Christensen Distinguished Lecture: Michael B. Gillespie

The Department of Art and Art History's Christensen Distinguished Lecture Series presents Michael Boyce Gillespie, associate professor of cinema studies at New York University, who will give a talk titled, "Dreams and False Alarms: Circuits, Visual Historiography, and the Art of Blackness."

Centered on Terry Adkins’s Flumen Orationis (2012) and Morgan Quaintance's Missing Time (2019), this talk considers the aesthetic, cultural, and historiographic frequencies of the art of blackness. Working across contemporary art, music, and cinema, the presentation will detail the consequential ways that these objects enact and render blackness with an experimental/avant-garde practice that poses new conceptual circuits for understanding black visual historiography.

Michael Boyce Gillespie is author of Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (Duke University Press, 2016) and co-editor of Black One Shot, an art criticism series on ASAP/J. His work focuses on black visual and expressive culture, film theory, visual historiography, popular music, and contemporary art. His recent writing has appeared in Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898-1971, Film Quarterly, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies. He was the consulting producer on The Criterion Collection releases of Deep Cover, Shaft, and Drylongso. He is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies in the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies at New York University.

This lecture is made possible by a generous grant from Carmen M. Christensen.

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VISITOR INFORMATION: Oshman Hall is located in the McMurtry Building on Stanford campus at 355 Roth Way. Visitor parking is free all day on weekends and after 4 pm on weekdays, except by the Oval. Alternatively, take the Caltrain to Palo Alto Transit Center and hop on the free Stanford Marguerite Shuttle. If you need a disability-related accommodation or wheelchair access information, please contact Julianne Garcia at juggarci [at] stanford.edu (juggarci[at]stanford[dot]edu). Seating for this event is limited, and admission will be granted on a first-come, first-served basis. Please arrive to the venue early to secure your seat. This event is free and open to Stanford affiliates & the general public.

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