The Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College presents "Conversations on the Nature of Contemporary Curatorial Practice," a 3-part lecture series in conjunction with Mavis Pusey, Restless on view through January 3, 2027.
"Depths of Sorrow: Eldzier Cortor and the Aesthetics of Black Melancholia" with Dr. Nana Adusei-Poku
This talk considers what happens when an exhibition becomes a way of thinking, meaning when ideas unfold through affect, historical reference, dissonance, and encounter rather than through a thesis stated in advance. The 2022 exhibition Black Melancholia (CCS Bard Galleries) approached melancholia as an aesthetic and perceptual mode, emerging differently across works through absences, opacities, postures, materials, and other ways of inhabiting and registering the world. Its affective experience was itself conceptually driven, shaped by the exhibition design, juxtaposition of works and their historical situatedness, allowing meaning to remain open and conductive rather than settling into a single definition. What can an exhibition make perceptible that writing cannot? What happens when works are allowed to think alongside one another, and when histories surface in the spaces between them?
Nana Adusei-Poku, PhD, is Assistant Professor in African Diasporic Art History in the Department of History of Art and African American Studies at Yale University, New Haven. She published Taking Stakes in the Unknown: Tracing Post-Black Art in 2021, edited Reshaping the Field: Arts of the African Diasporas on Display (2023) and curated ‘Performances of Nothingness’ (Academy of Arts, Berlin, 2018) and Black Melancholia (Hessel Museum Bard College, New York 2022).
