The Art Galleries at Black Studies (AGBS) at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) will host its second annual Why Black Museums symposium on Thursday, March 7.
The annual series celebrates and examines the contributions of Black and culturally-specific museums. This year’s theme, Exhibitions and Relations, considers the ways Black individuals and communities collect, preserve, and exhibit art and objects, and how these ideas shape contemporary museum practices.
The day will include a morning and afternoon panel. The first session will be moderated by Dr. Gaila Sims, Curator of African American History at the Fredericksburg Area Museum, and will feature Austin-based historians and curators Carre Adams of the George Washington Carver Museum, Cultural, and Genealogy Center; Ulili Emore of the Contextualization & Commemoration Initiative at UT; and Dr. Jacqueline Smith-Francis of the Austin History Center. The second session will feature Dr. Bridget R. Cooks, author of the award-winning study Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (2011), and Dr. Kellie Jones, 2016 MacArthur Fellow and author of EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (2011).
Last year marked AGBS’ first Why Black Museums symposium, which was held in conjunction with the exhibition Old Wounds, Dark Dreams. This year, a retrospective featuring four decades of work by Alicia Henry will be on view in Alicia Henry: (un)knowing. Curated by Phillip Townsend, the exhibition includes mixed-media sculptures and installations that use found materials and textiles to distort and transform the human form. The exhibition is on view in the AGBS Christian-Green Gallery (201 E 21st Street) and is open Wednesday through Friday from Noon to 5 p.m. and on Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
A work by Alicia Henry
The Why Black Museums: Exhibitions and Relations symposium is free and open to the public. Participants can attend in-person or virtually. Learn more and register here.
