Lecture by Dr. Nikki Greene

Join us for a lecture by scholar and writer Dr. Nikki Greene as she discusses her recent book, "Grime, Glitter, and Glass: The Body and the Sonic in Contemporary Black Art" which examines how contemporary Black visual artists use sonic elements to refigure the formal and philosophical developments of Black art and culture.

A tea will be hosted at 4 PM, and the lecture will start at 5 PM in the gallery.

Focusing on the multimedia art of Renée Stout, Radcliffe Bailey, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Greene traces the intersection of the visual’s sonic possibilities with the Black body’s physical, representational, and metaphorical use in art. She employs her concept of “visual aesthetic musicality” to interpret Black visual art by examining the musical genres of jazz and rap, along with the often-overlooked innovations of funk and rumba, within art historiography. From Bailey’s use of multilayered surfaces of glitter, mud, and recycled materials to meditate on Sun Ra’s Afrofuturism to Stout’s life-size cast of her own body that recalls funk musician Betty Davis to Campos-Pons’s performative and sculptural references to sugar that resonate with the legacy of Celia Cruz, Greene outlines how these artists use mediums such as molded glass sculptures, viscous wet plaster, and dazzling mannequin heads to enhance the manifestations of Black identity. By foregrounding the sonic elements of their work, Greene demonstrates that these artists use sound to make themselves legible, recognizable, and audible.

NIKKI A. GREENE, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Art History at Wellesley College. She has traveled internationally to deliver lectures on the Arts of the African diaspora, including to Chile, England, Ethiopia, Italy, and South Africa. Greene’s essays have appeared in American Studies Journal,,, The Delaware Review of Latin American Studies, and WBUR Boston. She has also written for The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Guggenheim Museum, Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, among others. Grime, Glitter and Glass was awarded a Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant by the College Art Association.

Host or Publisher David C Driskell Center