Visiting Artist Talk: Anthea Black

All are welcome!

Anthea Black will be giving a special lecture on recent research and work, tied in to their curatorial project "Embodied Press" at the Mary E. Black (opening March 16th). The talk is followed by a dialogue between Profs. Black and Hollenbach.

The artist book is a perfect form to experience the pleasures and politics of the handmade. Saturated ink spreading across a page. Looking that quickly turns the page to touch. "Embodied Press" Curator Anthea Black will present new research focusing on artist books by queer and trans artists overlapping several successive decades of LGBTQ+ and queer-feminist political action. So what happens when a book object (or a body) “frustrates legibility” or becomes difficult to read? It must be felt. Held in our hands. Absorbed. Pleasure and care is found in each artist’s skillful orchestration of material to engage a range of senses. Black will present works that revel in defiant possibilities of abstraction and the handmade - conveying experience deeply felt, but difficult to publicly express through language or imagery alone. 

About Anthea Black:
Anthea Black (b. 1981) is a Canadian artist, writer, and curator. Their ongoing engagement with contemporary craft includes The New Politics of the Handmade: Craft, Art and Design (Bloomsbury, 2020), “Craft and the Polymorphous Perverse” and Pleasure Craft (Carleton University Art Gallery, 2016) and SUPER STRING (Stride Gallery, 2005). Black’s new curated exhibition The Embodied Press: Queer Abstraction and the Artists’ Book is at Mary E Black Gallery through May 7, 2023. They are an Assistant Professor at California College of the Arts.