Lecture | Talk
A Nimble Arc: James Van Der Zee and Photography
- Dr. Emile Boone
- Date
- Wednesday 13 November 2024
- Time
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 2.17
While James Van Der Zee is widely known and praised for his studio portraits from the Harlem Renaissance era, much of the diversity and expansive reach of his work has been overlooked. From the major role his studio played for decades photographing ordinary people and events in the Harlem community to the inclusion of his photographs in the landmark “Harlem on My Mind” exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969, Van Der Zee was a foundational Black photographer whose work illustrates the shifting ways photography serves as a constitutive force within Black life. In A Nimble Arc, Emilie Boone considers Van Der Zee’s photographic work over the course of the twentieth century, showing how it foregrounded aspects of Black daily life in the United States and in the larger African diaspora. Boone argues that Van Der Zee’s work exists at the crossroads of art and the vernacular, challenging the distinction between canonical art photographs and the kind of output common to commercial photography studios.
Note: a follow-up workshop for graduate students will be held on Thursday, November 14 at 9:30 to 11:00 in Herta Mohr 0.26. Students are invited to contact j.j.morgan-owens@hum.leidenuniv.nl for more details.
About the speaker
Emilie Boone is an assistant professor of African American/African Diaspora Arts in the Department of Art History at New York University. She researches and teaches the art and visual culture of the African Diaspora with a focus on vernacular photography and global encounters. Her scholarship appears in academic journals including Art Journal, American Art, History of Photography, and African Arts. She has received fellowships from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Fulbright. She is the author of A Nimble Arc: James Van Der Zee and Photography, Duke University Press, 2023.
