Dr. Kirsten Pai Buick "Landscape as Translation: Social Relations as Spatial Relations"
September 28, 2021
OCTOBER 12, 2021
On Oct. 12, the Art and Art History Department is pleased to host Carol Bowers Norris Endowed Speaker Dr. Kirsten Pai Buick to give a talk titled "Landscape as Translation: Social Relations as Spatial Relations." What we assume to be identities that we carry with us are fluid and contingent. In any given context, our spatial relations can tell us about our
social relations relative to gendered, classed, and racialized hierarchies. The first quarter of the 19th century marked three watershed moments in the imperial project of U.S. formation, with each moment codified in landscape representation: the invention of the frontier; the Doctrine of Discovery deployed by the Supreme Court to transfer land from First Nations People into the coffers of the federal government; and the beginning of domestic tourism. We will use this opportunity to understand the necessity of the visual and how landscape functioned to translate such concepts as citizenship and belonging as well as the "not there" and the "nowhere" and the "no one" according to national priorities.
Kirsten Pai Buick is Professor of Art History at the University of New Mexico where she teaches in the areas of the visual culture of the first British Empire; U.S. art to 1940; African American art; representations of the American landscape and representations of enslavement; and the history of women as patrons and collectors of the arts. She has published extensively on African American art and been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Pre-Doctoral Fellowship and the Charles Gaius Bolin Fellowship at Williams College. In 2015, she was chosen as the eleventh recipient of the David C. Driskell Prize for excellence in African American Art. Her book, Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the ‘Problem’ of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject, is published by Duke University Press. Her second book, In Authenticity: ‘Kara Walker’ and the Eidetics of Racism is in progress. 
Alongside this remote lecture, Dr. Pai Buick will lead a seminar on Wednesday October 13th for seniors and majors. For more information on that opportunity please contact Misti Scott at mscott@depauw.esu or Natalia Vargas Márquez at nataliavargasmarquez@depauw.edu.
This visit is made possible by the Carol Bowers Norris Endowed Speaker Series
Co-sponsored by the Africana Studies Department.
Public Event – Lecture - Online
7:00 pm, Tuesday, October 12
On Zoom
Free and open to the public
Artwork: "Boone's First View of Kentucky" by William Tylee Ranney, 1849
Image credit the author.