"Politics of the Visual" is a 2024-25 lecture series exploring pressing inquiries about the political dimensions of visuality and representation, power structures of looking, and phenomena of spectacle. The series is organized by Dr. Victoria Papa and supported by Hardman Special Initiatives and MOSAIC.
All events are free and open to the public, and are held at the MOSAIC Events Space at 49 Main St. in North Adams. Organized by Victoria Papa, Associate Professor of English & Visual Culture at MCLA. Co-sponsored by Hardman Special Initiatives and MOSAIC at MCLA.
The opacity lent by the convergence of technology and magic offers fertile ground for contemporary artists: for seeking power, solace, and healing, and for refusing systems’ efforts to control their lives and stories. Alexandra Foradas discusses two curatorial projects—Like Magic and Osman Khan’s Road to Hybridabad, both at MASS MoCA—that address technologies of magic including rituals, talismans, prayer, folklore, AI, divination, and more.
Alexandra Foradas (she/they) is an art historian and Curator at MASS MoCA, where she has organized exhibitions by Osman Khan, Jason Moran, EJ Hill, Lady Pink, Taryn Simon, Jenny Holzer, Janice Kerbel, and the group exhibitions Like Magic, Deep Water, Kissing through a Curtain, and Bibliothecaphilia. They currently teach at RISD.
Documentary poetics is a process of historical relearning that finds itself at the intersection of poetic storytelling and “fact-based” documentation, challenging the salience of the latter. In this lecture, Anaïs Duplan argues that land ownership and citizenship have directly shaped the landscape of what we now think of as contemporary documentary poetics. Anaïs will use the history of the city of Los Angeles in the context of the Watts Rebellion in the 1960s as the thread throughout his argument.
Anaïs Duplan (he/they) is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of several books including I NEED MUSIC (Action Books, 2021) and Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020). He is a professor of postcolonial literature at Bennington College.
Caroline Fowler is Starr Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute. Her most recent book, Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art (Duke UP, 2025) considers how the transubstantiation of life into property transformed the Dutch visual economy.
Nikki Greene is Associate Professor of Art History at Wellesley College. Her book, Grime, Glitter, and Glass: The Body and The Sonic in Contemporary Black Art (Duke UP, October 2024) presents a new interpretation of the work of Renée Stout, and Radcliffe Bailey, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons, and considers the intersection between the body, black identity, and the sonic possibilities of the visual using key examples of painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and installation.
Susannah Cahalan is a #1 New York Times–bestselling author, journalist and public speaker. Her first book, Brain on Fire, has sold over a million copies and has been translated into more than twenty languages. Her second book, The Great Pretender, was shortlisted for the Royal Society’s 2020 Science Book Prize. She lives in New Jersey with her family.
