The School of Art in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences is pleased to welcome Tyler Denmead, associate professor at the faculty of education at the University of Cambridge and fellow and director of studies at Queen's College, to the fall Visiting Lecture Series. Denmead researches and writes about youth, arts, culture and race, with a particular focus on whiteness and will present a lecture titled "Seeing Ourselves Out of This World" at 5:30 p.m. today, Thursday, Nov. 10, at Hillside Auditorium 202. The lecture is free and open to the public.

In his talk, Denmead will interrogate the problematic contradictions that emerge when people read literature or look at art created by Black women as a means of becoming anti-racist. His analysis of this phenomenon will focus on a complex visual field that he witnessed while viewing Fons Americanus, Kara Walker's 2019 counter-monument to the transatlantic slave trade at the Tate Modern. 

Through this visual analysis, he will call for a relational practice of viewing art that acknowledges the repetition of historical subjectivities that were forged through slavery itself. This relational practice has a glimmer of critical pedagogic potential, one that might demand collective accountability and activate the imagination through letting go of the possessive orientation to autonomous selfhood that is foundational to whiteness and official forms of anti-racism.

Denmead holds a doctoral degree in education from the University of Cambridge and is the founding executive director of New Urban Arts, a welcoming community of high school students and adult mentors in Providence, Rhode Island, sharing space, skills and resources to inspire creative expression.

He is the author of The Creative Underclass: Youth, Race, and the Gentrifying City, an ethnographic examination of how youth creatively and culturally respond to racializing discourses of "troubled youth" that have been central to state-led creative urban gentrification schemes. His current book project is a critical examination of anti-racist reading practices, with a particular focus on a 2021 British legal case in which a White nationalist, convicted of possessing information useful to plotting a terrorist attack, was sentenced to reading canonical English literature. 

Join tonight's lecture by Denmead at 5:30 p.m. at Hillside Auditorium room 202.