Vision & Justice: Photography, Race, and Power

This 3 part course will focus on the crucial interplay of art, justice, and the contestation for citizenship in a radicalized America, from Civil War to the Black Lives Matter Movement, from WWI to the Muslim Ban.

Inspired by Frederick Douglass’s ideas about the role of images for American progress, topics will include: the role of aesthetics for the invention of race, the abolition of transatlantic slavery, the creation of and destabilization of U.S. segregation, the long Civil Rights movement, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

This course will also focus on other contemporary topics of great urgency today—the role of images for the creation of national policy, such as the Muslim ban, and its ties to images of Japanese internment—culminating in a public discussion led by Harvard Professor Sarah Lewis.

Ultimately, this course aims to develop skills of visual literacy—an increasingly vital skill for citizenship in the 21st century.

Sarah Lewis is an Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Before joining the faculty at Harvard, she held curatorial positions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Tate Modern, London and taught at Yale University School of Art.  Lewis’s research interests focus on representations of race in contemporary art and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America culture and across the Black Atlantic world. She is the guest editor of the landmark “Vision & Justice” issue of Aperture Magazine which will serve as the text for this class.











When: Fri., Mar. 24, 2017 at 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
Where: Brooklyn Public Library - Central Library
10 Grand Army Plaza
718-230-2100
Price: Free
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This 3 part course will focus on the crucial interplay of art, justice, and the contestation for citizenship in a radicalized America, from Civil War to the Black Lives Matter Movement, from WWI to the Muslim Ban.

Inspired by Frederick Douglass’s ideas about the role of images for American progress, topics will include: the role of aesthetics for the invention of race, the abolition of transatlantic slavery, the creation of and destabilization of U.S. segregation, the long Civil Rights movement, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

This course will also focus on other contemporary topics of great urgency today—the role of images for the creation of national policy, such as the Muslim ban, and its ties to images of Japanese internment—culminating in a public discussion led by Harvard Professor Sarah Lewis.

Ultimately, this course aims to develop skills of visual literacy—an increasingly vital skill for citizenship in the 21st century.

Sarah Lewis is an Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Before joining the faculty at Harvard, she held curatorial positions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Tate Modern, London and taught at Yale University School of Art.  Lewis’s research interests focus on representations of race in contemporary art and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America culture and across the Black Atlantic world. She is the guest editor of the landmark “Vision & Justice” issue of Aperture Magazine which will serve as the text for this class.

Buy tickets/get more info now