Big Ideas in Art and Culture Lecture Series: Black Vitality—Life, Listening, and The Sugar Shack with Derrais Carter
Art Gallery of Guelph, 358 Gordon Street, Guelph
Thursday, April 27, 2023
Doors at 7pm
Lecture/listening party: Derrais Carter, 7:30pm
Music: Joni NehRita 8:30pm
Reception to follow, catered by Community FEWD
Cash bar
This Big Ideas in Art + Culture talk with artist Derrais Carter is a collective listening session masquerading as a lecture. Pairing musical selections from the Black Revelry Quiet Storm radio show with close readings of Ernie Barnes’ painting The Sugar Shack, we’ll ask what happens when we use the painting to narrate Black life. Derrais (sounds like Paris) Carter is an artist, writer, and Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. Carter will be discussing Black Revelry: In Honor of The Sugar Shack (If I Can’t Dance, 2022), an artist book and creative suite celebrating The Sugar Shack. The book will be available for sale.
Guelph-based, Jamaican-Canadian musician Joni NehRita invites listeners to feel, move and think more with her gift for writing catchy melodies dressed in jazzy chords ready to hit the beach—south of the border, of course! This knack for sun-drenched melodies and infectious grooves help her message of equity, social change and the cultivation of compassion to be received like a cool drink on a sweltering day.
This Big Ideas in Art and Culture Lecture is presented in partnership with Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener + Area (CAFKA), the Art Gallery of Guelph, the ArtsEverywhere Festival, and Musagetes.
Derrais Carter is an interdisciplinary scholar and artist. His scholarly and creative work plays in the vibrant realms of Black Critical Theory, Black Queer Studies, and Black Popular Culture, Narrative Theory, and Cultural History. Carter's publication Black Revelry: In Honor of the Sugar Shack, a book-album built around Ernie Barnes’ painting The Sugar Shack featured collaborations with writers, visual artists, dancers and a dj, the projects delights in the ways a painting reflects and animates various renderings of Black social life and intimacy. This project is also the basis for Carter’s limited-run radio show Black Revelry Quiet Storm which aired in Los Angeles, Berlin, and Amsterdam from December 2020 through February 2021. The broadcasts can be found here: gathering| dispersal | frequency.
