A Flood of Rememory: Hurricane Katrina and Visual Trama
Tuesday, October 14, 2008, 6:00 - 7:30 PM
Henry Auditorium
All UW Art History Lectures are FREE and open to the public and will be held in the Auditorium. Seating is limited. For more information or to RSVP, contact Nicole Bernard at 206.616.6544 or .
Current events often produce historic comparisons and, in an increasingly visual and virtual social culture, the past can seem to inhabit the present in an uncanny way. When the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina became a part of our present and then our past, it produced many responses, some of them political, others visual. A Flood of Rememory: Hurricane Katrina and Visual Trauma explores the visual responses of Katrina Survivors and artists, such as Kara Waker and Spike Lee, who have recognized the relationship between the symbolic experiences of contemporary inequity and the visual legacy of African Enslavement in America, the Civil War, and the Jim Crow Era.
Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw is Associate Professor of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. Her book, Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century, was published by University of Washington Press in 2006. She is the author of two books, numerous articles, reviews, and book chapters.