About this Event
Saturday | May 4th | 4pm EST
Please join us at Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore for a conversation between artist and creative nonfiction writer Catherine Lord and professor of Caribbean cultures and ecologies Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert to mark the launch of The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men (no place press, 2023).
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An investigation of memory, both personal and national, that broadens the dialogue on colonialism, complicity, and cultural property.
In The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men, a title appropriated from an obscure eugenics tract, artist and writer Catherine Lord takes the commonplace books of Dr. Henry Alfred Alford Nicholls (a botanist, physician, and plantation owner on the Commonwealth of Dominica, an island of middling size halfway along the Caribbean archipelago, one of the more insignificant of the fifty-nine colonies of the British Empire, and the place where Lord was born in 1949) as the framework for a bellicose, mordant, and often wry critique of power relations between colonizer and colonized, public and private, image and word.
In over 300 entries, she takes an unflinching look at artists like Agostino Brunias (known for his paintings of Creole society throughout the British West Indies); patrons like politician and sugar plantation owner Sir William Young (Governor of Dominica from 1768 until 1772, when he made an ignominious exit); novelists like Jean Rhys, forced to leave her home island for England; a portrait of a Creole white by a lesbian Polish Jew relocated by the British to Dominica after World War II; and a possibly bootlegged copy of Heinrich von Angeli painting of Queen Victoria.
Through its nuanced explorations of visual culture and novel approach to art historical study, The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men broadens the dialogue on colonialism, complicity, and cultural property.
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Catherine Lord, Professor Emerita of Art at the University of California, Irvine, and former Dean of the School of Art at the California Institute of the Arts, is an artist and creative nonfiction writer who now lives in New York. Her work has been supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation, Anonymous was a Woman, and Creative Capital. Lord's articles on photography, feminism, and queer culture have been widely published and anthologized. Her books include The Summer of Her Baldness: A Cancer Improvisation (2004) and, co-authored with Richard Meyer, Art and Queer Culture (2013).
Lisa Paravisini-Gebert works in the fields of literature and cultural studies, specializing in the multidisciplinary, comparative study of the Caribbean. Growing up in her native Puerto Rico, she became fascinated by the many cultural connections between Caribbean peoples despite our different histories and languages and has made that the subject of her research and teaching. Paravisini-Gebert is a Professor of Caribbean culture and literature in the Department of Hispanic Studies at Vassar College.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, United States
USD 0.00