Death’s Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power

Sampada Aranke in conversation with Essence Harden

Thursday, April 20 4:30-6 PM

This book launch and signing event celebrates Death’s Futurity by Sampada Aranke (Ph.D. ’13). Her book examines the importance of representations of death to Black liberation. Aranke analyzes posters, photographs, journalism and films that focus on the murders of Black Panther Party members Lil’ Bobby Hutton, Fred Hampton and George Jackson to construct a visual history of the 1960s and 1970s Black Power era. By foregrounding the photographed, collaged, filmed and drawn Black body, Aranke demonstrates that corporeality is crucial to the efforts to shape visions of a Black future free from white supremacy.

Sampada Aranke is the co-curator of the museum’s current exhibition Mike Henderson: Before the Fire, 1965–1985. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the director of Mellon Archives Innovation Programs at the Rebuild Foundation, Chicago.

Essence Harden is a visual arts curator and program manager at the California African American Museum and an independent arts writer. Harden has curated exhibitions at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), Oakland Museum of California, El Segundo Museum of Art (ESMoA), the Orange County Museum of Art (OMCA) and Art + Practice, among others.