Alchemizing the Everyday

Join us at Edinburgh College of Art to hear from US curator Dr Sharbreon Plummer known for her recent exhibition Of Salt and Spirit: Black Quilters in the American South, Mississippi Museum of Art 2025. She will share reflections on Black women’s art and curation ahead of the release of her new book Stories in the Seams: A People’s History of Black Quilts and Their Makers (Autumn 2026). We will be joined by Edinburgh’s local, Lighthouse Books with a selection of relevant books & resources for sale.

This lecture will take place in person and online. Please select the ticket you would like at booking. Online details will be sent closer to the event.

About the Lecture

What does it mean to curate from a position of embodied knowledge? How might we make exhibitions, build archives, construct narratives and shape worlds not merely about Black women’s art, but through the epistemological traditions Black women have always carried? In this lecture, Dr. Sharbreon S. Plummer explores curatorial practice as a form of Black feminist praxis, as an intellectual methodology, a political act, and a commitment to care.

Drawing on over fifteen years of curatorial, scholarly, and community-based work centered on Black creative traditions, particularly within the American South, Dr. Plummer reflects on a variety of activations and exhibitions that were shaped by Black feminist frameworks that center intersectionality, embodiment, and the subjectivity of the curator as a methodological tool. She traces the intellectual genealogy of these frameworks and examines how they challenge what counts as evidence, expertise, and art historical authority within institutional spaces.

Central to this discussion is the role of textile and material traditions as sites of “embodied knowledge,” and how these modes of knowing/making/transmitting culture can resist reduction by dominant art historical narratives. This lecture invites students, practitioners, and researchers to reconsider the relationships between art and curatorship, and what possibilities are revealed when viewing them through the lens of Black feminist thought.

Dr Sharbreon Plummer is an independent curator & author based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana USA. This lecture is chaired by Dr Jess Bailey, Lecturer, History of Art, ECA, Edinburgh University. Bailey and Plummer co-founded The People’s Quilting Bee in 2023, a public pedagogy project about social justice histories of quilting. This lecture is generously supported by the RKEI Fund at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh.

Image Credit | Of Salt and Spirit: Black Quilters in the American South, Mississippi Museum of Art 2025

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