Jamal Batts: Curator-in-Residence
- Graduate Fine Arts
- Graduate Fine Arts Department, Weitzman School of Design (PennDesign)
Photo of Jamal Batts.
The Department of Fine Arts will host Jamal Batts, transdisciplinary scholar and curator as well as a doctoral candidate in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley, as Curator-in-Residence. Batts works dynamically across African American and African Diaspora Studies, Queer and Gender Studies, Visual Studies and Art History. Referencing Batts’ own words about his dissertation project, Immoral Panics: Black Queer Aesthetics and the Construction of Risk, “centers an established and emerging cohort of black queer contemporary visual artists and writers who articulate how blackness is historically constructed as a signal for erotic danger and utilize a host of aesthetic strategies to argue for risk-taking as a mode of erotic liberation.” As an expansion of his written dissertation, Batts is developing a curatorial project around the work of Mark Bradford, Sunil Gupta, Tiona Nekkia McClodden and Jonathan Lyndon Chase. During his time as Curator-in-Residence, Batts will research and develop this curatorial project; lead a student working group of undergraduate and graduate students; develop and execute a series of public-facing events; and meet with relevant Penn faculty and curators to discuss the conceptual and methodological investments of Batts’s curatorial project and the ways in which artworks that circulate blackness, queerness and erotics operate in the collective space of the exhibition.