Cheryl FinleyCommitted to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon

Join the Department of Art for a talk presented by Cheryl Finley, associate professor of art history at Cornell University.

Drawing from her award-winning monograph, Committed to Memory: the Art of the Slave Ship Icon (Princeton University Press, 2018), Finley, Distinguished Inaugural Director of the Atlanta University Center Collective for the Study of Art History and Curatorial Studies at Spelman College, discusses the visual archive that art historians, curators, artists and activists have mined to illustrate the tragedy and legacy of American slavery.

Using historic icons, little known ephemera, examples of contemporary art and time-based media, she demonstrates how the visual archive of slavery and its aftermath remains a strategic element of contemporary art’s transformative power.

This event is presented with support from the Art History Baldwin Endowment.

About the Author

Cheryl Finley is associate professor of art history at Cornell University. She is the coauthor of Harlem: A Century in Images and the coeditor of Diaspora, Memory, Place: David Hammons, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Pamela Z.