Archive of Improvisation: Abstraction and Global Blackness in the Artworks of Caroline Kent

May 26th – 6 pm

Talk will be held in english.

Caroline Kent is a Chicago-based visual artist best known for her large-format abstract paintings. Inspired by her deep interest in foreign-language film, her personal experiences as a traveler, and her Mexican and African-American cultural heritage, Kent’s works explore the power of narrative and the limitations of communication.

Kent’s paintings — frequently based on backgrounds of black gesso and hung unstretched on gallery and museum walls — arise from her improvisatory sessions of paper cutting and versioning reminiscent of Romare Bearden’s collage process.

For “Archives of Improvisation: Abstraction and Global Blackness in the Artworks of Caroline Kent”, He has crafted a hybrid essay that overlaps personal narrative, critique, and archival exploration. The piece thinks alongside of and through a selection of Kent’s paintings in an attempt to fashion a definition of global Blackness as multi-referential, counter-representational, and opaque.

Walton Muyumba is a writer and critic. He is the author of The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism. Muyumba’s essays and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, The Believer, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, Oxford American, and among other outlets. He teaches Global Black culture and literature at Indiana University-Bloomington.