Through readings of the works of abstract painter Mark Bradford and writer Gary Fisher, this talk takes up risk and risk-taking, as these concepts are mobilized in queer studies, to mark an aesthetic theory and speculative history of racialized moral panic. By considering the relation of blackness to queerness in these artists' works the talk will illuminate the racial implications of historicizing the HIV/AIDS epidemic during a contemporary moment wherein queer scholarship finds sexual risk-taking to be the vanguard of radical queer practice and black gay men are warned that one in two will contract HIV at some point in their lives.
Jamal Batts, PhD is a curator, writer, and scholar. He is currently a curator-in-residence in Penn’s Department of Fine Arts and a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow. His dissertation project, Immoral Panics: Black Queer Aesthetics and the Construction of Risk, reflected on the relationship between Black queer contemporary visual and literary art and the intricacies of sexual risk from the early HIV/AIDS crisis to the present. His writing has appeared in the catalogue for The New Museum’s exhibit “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon,” the publications Open Space, ASAP/J, New Life Quarterly, and SFMOMA’s website in conjunction with their “Modern Cinema” series. He was a 2020 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Scholar-in-Residence, 2020 Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow, and ONE National Lesbian & Gay Archives LGBTQ Research Fellow. In 2019, he served as the SFMOMA Summer Curatorial Intern in Contemporary Art where he curated film screenings and artist discussions for the exhibit “SOFT POWER.” He is a member of the curatorial collective The Black Aesthetic who have organized four seasons of black experimental film screenings and produced three edited volumes.
The Curator-in-Residence program is generously funded by the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, 2021 grant cycle.
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