Please join the Center for Ethnic Studies and the Department of History of Art for the Samella Lewis Initiative for the Study of Black Art's inaugural Artist x Writer talk. This conversation is between Wesaam Al-Badry (artist and journalist) and Benjamin L. Jones (Provost’s Fellow, History of Art Department). Jones writes about Al-Badry as an Iraqi refugee who is a student of the Black radical aesthetic tradition.
Wesaam Al-Badry is an investigative journalist and interdisciplinary artist working in photography, video installation, sculpture, and painting through interconnected themes of identity, migration, simulated wars, and the archives. His current projects investigate how image-based processes and texts are complicit in using racialized ethnographic studies in Iraq. Al-Badry has worked for global media outlets, including CNN and Al-Jazeera America. His photographs have been featured in the New York Times, Rolling Stone Magazine, The Atlantic, NPR, Fortune, The Nation, and Mother Jones. His artwork has been exhibited internationally at museums including the de Young Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco, the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany, Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York City, Bernstein Gallery at Princeton University, and Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.
Benjamin L. Jones researches the speculative analysis and praxis of oppressed people. He arrives at The Ohio State University by way of graduate studies at Northwestern University’s Department of Art History, where he also earned an interdisciplinary cluster certificate in Critical Theory. A practicing artist, Jones graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute with a B.A. in the History and Theory of Contemporary Art (highest honors). His art-historical interests include contemporary intersections of art and power, futurism, and Black radical visual culture and performance.
This event is free and open to the public.
