Ginger Nolan: Racial Mediapolitics: Aspen, Africa, and the Environmental Surround, 1943-1970

Smart Lecture

Ginger Nolan: Racial Mediapolitics: Aspen, Africa, and the Environmental Surround, 1943-1970

Lecture
CWAC 157
Add to Calendar 2023-03-02 17:00:00 2023-03-02 17:00:00 Ginger Nolan: Racial Mediapolitics: Aspen, Africa, and the Environmental Surround, 1943-1970 We invite you to join the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago for this upcoming lecture as part of the 2022-23 Smart Lecture series. The lecture is Thursday, March 2 at 5pm with a Q&A session and reception to follow. This event will take place in CWAC 157 with a simultaneous live stream over zoom.  Drawing on archives from the Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies and its yearly International Design Conference, this research examines how race, media, and environmentality were conceptualized by (mostly) Euro-Americans in early decades of the Cold War, amidst African decolonization movements and the United States' own rising civil rights movement. The talk will trace theories of media and environment advanced by figures ranging from the Bauhaus-trained graphic designer Herbert Bayer, the colonial missionary Albert Schweitzer, the colonial ethnopsychiatrist J.C. Carothers, and the media theorist Marshall McLuhan. Conversely, we will see how one Aspen conference participant, the Harlem-based lawyer and urban activist, Cora Walker, offered a counterexample of environmental politics. Ginger Nolan is an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California's School of Architecture. Her research explores relationships between architecture, media technologies, race, and governmentality. She has published through the University of Minnesota Press the books Savage Mind to Savage Machine: Racial Science and Twentieth-Century Design (2021) and The Neocolonialism of the Global Village (2018). She is currently researching and writing a book provisionally titled "Black Capitalism and the City: Architectures, Art, and Actuarial Praxis" that examines relationships between race, risk, actuarial methods, and urbanism in the twentieth-century US, focusing on the role of African American insurance companies in shaping cities and suburbs.  Presented by the Department of Art History as part of the 2022/23 Smart Lecture series supported by the Smart Family Foundation. CWAC 157 Department of Art History drupal@seastar.uchicago.edu America/Chicago public
Two men push a log while two others look on

We invite you to join the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago for this upcoming lecture as part of the 2022-23 Smart Lecture series. The lecture is Thursday, March 2 at 5pm with a Q&A session and reception to follow. This event will take place in CWAC 157 with a simultaneous live stream over zoom. 

Drawing on archives from the Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies and its yearly International Design Conference, this research examines how race, media, and environmentality were conceptualized by (mostly) Euro-Americans in early decades of the Cold War, amidst African decolonization movements and the United States' own rising civil rights movement. The talk will trace theories of media and environment advanced by figures ranging from the Bauhaus-trained graphic designer Herbert Bayer, the colonial missionary Albert Schweitzer, the colonial ethnopsychiatrist J.C. Carothers, and the media theorist Marshall McLuhan. Conversely, we will see how one Aspen conference participant, the Harlem-based lawyer and urban activist, Cora Walker, offered a counterexample of environmental politics.

Ginger Nolan is an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California's School of Architecture. Her research explores relationships between architecture, media technologies, race, and governmentality. She has published through the University of Minnesota Press the books Savage Mind to Savage Machine: Racial Science and Twentieth-Century Design (2021) and The Neocolonialism of the Global Village (2018). She is currently researching and writing a book provisionally titled "Black Capitalism and the City: Architectures, Art, and Actuarial Praxis" that examines relationships between race, risk, actuarial methods, and urbanism in the twentieth-century US, focusing on the role of African American insurance companies in shaping cities and suburbs. 

Presented by the Department of Art History as part of the 2022/23 Smart Lecture series supported by the Smart Family Foundation.