4-5 pm closing reception in the lobby of the Fisher Fine Arts Library Building
5-6:30 pm panel discussion, “The Women of the Driskell Circle” in the Arthur Ross Gallery
Register: In-person | Zoom
As the David C. Driskell and Friends exhibition makes clear, over the course of his lifetime, David C. Driskell developed strong supportive relationships with many Black women artists, celebrating their art with his scholarship and advocacy, while also publicly honoring the impact of their work on his own artistic career. Driskell’s allyship as male “womanist,” a feminist framework writer Alice Walker utilized to recognize specific issues at the intersection of race and gender in the United States, was remarkable within his generation of Black male artists, many of whom seldom supported the work of women with the same enthusiasm as they did that of other men.
“The Women of the Driskell Circle” panel seeks to foreground and lift up a lifetime of friendships and artistic exchanges that Driskell had with women artists featured in the David C.Driskell and Friends exhibition, including Loïs Maillou Jones, Betye Saar, Margo Humphreys, Elizabeth Catlett, and highlight the impact of his consistent mentoring of women scholars of Black art history during his tenure at the University of Maryland.
The panel will feature art historians Adrienne Childs, Senior Consulting Curator, The Phillips Collection; Cherise Smith, Joseph D. Jamail Chair in African American Studies in the Department African & African Diaspora Studies, University of Texas, Austin; and Rebecca Vandiver, Associate Professor of African American Art, Vanderbilt University in a conversation moderated by Jordana Moore Saggese, Professor and Director of the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland.
Supported by a grant for the “Contested Bodies” series of convenings from the Terra Foundation for American Art.