Art history professor Krista Thompson will give a Alfred Glassell Jr. Endowed Lecture to the School of Art on Tuesday, October 19, 2021 at 5:30 p.m. in 103 Design Building Auditorium.

Due to COVID-19 and continuing safety efforts, spaces will be limited and attendees will be admitted on a first come, first serve basis.

Tom Lloyd was among a wave of artists working with light and electronic technologies in the 1960s.  He was involved with the avant-garde Howard Wise Gallery in New York and was a founding member of the activist group the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) (1969-1971). The AWC pressured museums to diversify their exhibitions, collections, and audiences. Black Light explores Lloyd’s early centrality in the mainstream art world in New York in the 1960s and seeks to understand why few archival and material traces remain of the work of an artist who waged precisely against the institutional disregard of Black and Puerto Rican artists.  Lloyd was particularly interested in the concept of refraction, the process in which a light wave bends when it interacts with a medium. This talk considers refraction as a critical artistic, archival, and art historical practice. About the Speaker Krista Thompson is the Mary Jane Crowe Professor of Art History, and affiliated faculty in the Department of African American Studies and the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. She researches and teaches modern and contemporary art and visual culture of the Africa diaspora and the Caribbean. She is the author of An Eye for the Tropics (Duke University Press, 2006), Developing Blackness (The National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, 2008), and Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (Duke University Press, 2015), recipient of the Charles Rufus Morey Award for distinguished book in the history of art from the College Art Association (2016).