Nicholas Mirzoeff: “Whiteness and the Crisis”

Nicholas Mirzoeff was joined at noon in UWM’s Mathis Gallery by David Pacifico (Director, Emile H. Mathis Gallery) and Samantha Maloney (Art History, UWM) for a discussion on “Strategies for Colonial Art” before giving a lecture on “Whiteness and the Crisis.”

During the talk Mirzoeff considered what Frantz Fanon called the colonial “world of statues.” By this Fanon meant both the widespread physical presence of colonial statues and museums, and the colonial refusal to allow mobility. These statues and their preservation of immobility form the infrastructures of “race” in material form. The dispossessed claim mobility and deploy their capacity. To sustain these claims, new infrastructures are required—first of services, and then of what Mirzoeff calls “appearance,” the right to appear and be seen as a fully human person.

About the Speaker:

Nicholas Mirzoeff is professor of media, culture and communication at NYU. A writer and activist, he has recently curated the exhibit “Decolonizing Appearance” at the Center for Art Migration Politics, Copenhagen (Sep 2018 – Mar 2019). His The Appearance of Black Lives Matter is a free e-book from NAME Publications and was also published in limited edition hard-cover with a graphic essay by artist Carl Pope and a poem by Karen Pope.