Critically Re-reading, -telling, and -archiving — 2023

Critically Re-reading, -telling, and -archiving through Art Practice

Lightning Talk | Friday, May 19th, 2023 | 12:00pm – 1:00pm EST

Courtney will present an overview of her working dissertation entitled “Art as Information: Re-reading Quicksand”—a micro-study of an African American cultural narrative through artmaking. Research resulting from this study will emerge from intersecting auto/bio/fiction, archives, and art pedagogy. It is a critical and cyclical exploration that interrogates Nella Larsen’s autobiographical and fictional novel, Quicksand (1928), as an artifact and living artwork to invite ongoing inquiry and knowledge production on Black womanhood. This presentation will also exhibit artworks-in-progress that reiterate and interpret knowledges that emerge from rereading Quicksand.

[This talk will be recorded live.]

Presenter: Courtney Richardson / Presenter slides (PDF version included)

Courtney Richardson (she/her) is an artist-scholar working at the intersection of arts, archives, and African-American histories. Based in her hometown, Detroit, MI, she holds an MFA in Art-Graphic Design (Wayne State University) and is a PhD candidate in Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Courtney’s practice and research involve examining arts’ roles within knowledge production and its decolonization: how we craft, document, process, and circulate information through making art to dismantle and recuperate from societal ills.