Elizabeth Hamilton - Art History and African American Studies, Fort Valley State University

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.Today’s conversation is with Elizabeth Hamilton, who teaches art history and African American studies at Fort Valley State University. Her work is broadly engaged with African diasporic art practices, ranging from the vernacular to Afrofuturism, and she is the author of Charting the Afrofuturist Imaginary in African American Art and the forthcoming Figuring It Out: Black Womanhood through the Figurative in Alison Saar's Oeuvre, a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. In this discussion, we explore the place of Black Studies sensibilities in art history, the politics of art and art criticism, and the significance of vernacular culture forms for understanding Black life.