Please join us for the next CuSPP Seminar (taking place both in-person and via zoom)

Monday, 27 November, 1-2pm, AD Hope Conference Room (see CuSPP email or contact wesley.lim@anu.edu.au for zoom link)

Surprisingly little attention has been given in discussions about the Western avant garde to the insightful work of the Black Arts Movement in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s. Brooklyn-based artist Adam Pendleton and his contemporary Black Dada project, however, make clear the important if underappreciated contributions of the Black Arts Movement to ongoing avant-garde criticality. In redeploying a key text from 1964 – namely, Amiri Baraka’s poem “Black Dada Nihilismus”– Pendleton forces us, in the present moment, to confront the foundational aesthetic, racist, gendered, and sexist assumptions of the Western avant-garde project in its totality.

Thomas O. Haakenson is Associate Professor, History of Art and Visual Culture Program and former Associate Provost as well as Special Assistant to the Provost for Faculty Support at California College of the Arts (CCA). In 2021, Haakenson published the monograph Grotesque Visions: The Science of Berlin Dada, which examines the radical avant-garde interventions of certain Berlin Dada artists as they challenged the questionable practices and evidentiary claims of late-19th- and early-20th-century science. His current book projects include the monograph Decolonizing the European Avant-Garde.