Lecture, Abstracts of Intimacy by Darby English, University of Chicago.

 

Among other subjects this talk will consider two 1971 exhibitions of abstract art—one at the Whitney Museum of American Art and another at a disused movie house in a blighted zone of Houston, Texas—which momentarily reconstituted high modernism as a progressive front in the struggle for civil rights, at once presenting abstract art on its own terms and as an ameliorative response to the increasingly polarized situation of the races in the US.

Professor English is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago and author of How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (MIT Press, 2007). He is currently working on a book about about later 20th-century abstraction in America.

 

Reception to follow lecture.