Scholar Lectures

A discussion of images, truth, representation, and justice. Lewis will discuss her initiative, Vision & Justice, and speak to the impact of images in the public realm and their capacity to shape the interwoven fabric of individual identity, community collaboration, and democratic participation, revealing the foundational role visual culture plays in generating equity and justice.

Sarah Elizabeth Lewis is an art and cultural historian. She is the Endowed John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities & Associate Professor of African & African American Studies at Harvard University and the founder of Vision & Justice. Lewis also serves on the Standing Committee on American Studies and the Standing Committee on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the intersection of visual representation, racial justice, and democracy in the United States from the nineteenth century through the present. 

Read the April 2024 The New York Times article on Vision & Justice.

A look at how photographs in a variety of forms and genres—including surveillance images, documentary photography, personal images, and public art—influences ideas of Black citizenship.

Leigh Raiford, Ph.D, is a Professor of African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where she teaches, researches, writes, and curates about race, gender, justice, and visuality. She is the inaugural director of the Black Studies Collaboratory, a three-year project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. 

This talk considers the intertwined dialogues between and the impact of Civil Rights photography on American environmental photography of the late twentieth century.

Makeda Best, Ph.D., is currently the Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA). Best comes to OMCA after serving at Harvard University Art Museums as Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography since 2017, and previously as Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at California College of the Arts. Beyond photography, Best conceived of the Museums’ curatorial ReFrame initiative, which aims to critically examine the museum and its collections.

Considering photography's multiple roles in virtually all social justice movements, from the civil rights movement to protests against the Vietnam War to feminism to the Central American wars to Black Lives Matter to the climate crisis and more recent feminist actions.

Lucy R. Lippard is a writer, activist, sometime curator, and author of 25 books on contemporary art and cultural criticism. She has co-founded various artists’ feminist and activist organizations and publications. She lives off the grid in rural Galisteo, New Mexico, where for 23 years, she has edited the monthly community newsletter: El Puente de Galisteo.

Published photos have made a significant impact on the public and lawmakers regarding Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, anti-war efforts, LGBTQ, and Immigrant Rights. This talk surveys the role of some iconic photographs in our country's most transformative political movements for racial, gender, and class equality.

Kymberly Pinder, Ph.D., is a Scholar, Curator and is currently the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Dean at the Yale School of Art, Yale University. She was a professor and administrator for sixteen years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before coming to New Mexico where she was dean of the College of Fine Arts at UNM from 2012 until 2019.

As the war grinds on in Ukraine, what can we learn from conflict photographs made almost two centuries ago? How do James Nachtwey’s recent photographs of Ukrainian battle sites connect with those by Matthew Brady or W. Eugene Smith? Because wars are ever-changing and ever-constant. This lecture will discuss the recurring patterns that are the points of departure for recent searing photographs.

Anne Wilkes Tucker was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she attended public schools. She received undergraduate degrees from Randolph Macon Woman's College and Rochester Institute of Technology and a graduate degree from the Visual Studies Workshop, a division of the State University of New York, which sponsored classes, first at the George Eastman House and then at the V.S.W, studying with Beaumont Newhall and Nathan Lyons.

From its inception in the decades before the Civil War, photography has helped Americans not only to see their families anew, but to imagine newly the communities to which those families belonged. Some have been enhanced; others were dispossessed. This talk will present an array of past and present struggles over the social image unleashed by the photographic age.

Laura Wexler is the Charles H. Farnam Professor of American Studies, and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Yale University, and Acting Co-Chair of the Public Humanities Program at Yale, where she studies the photographic reproduction of race, gender, sexuality, class, and region from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.