This panel introduces visual dynamics as an emergent methodological framework for African and diasporic studies. It foregrounds the relational interplay between visual culture, ethical life, and infrastructures of Black care. Moving beyond representational analysis, the panel examines how artists, curators, and cultural practitioners across Africa and its diasporas produce visual forms that operate as ethical systems—structures that sustain, repair, and reimagine Black life beyond the frameworks of colonialism, apartheid, racial capitalism, and their afterlives.
Drawing on case studies from South Africa, the United States, and transnational cultural networks, participants analyze artistic practices that engage questions of care, embodiment, abstraction, and institutional critique. The panel situates visual culture not only as an object of interpretation but as an active site of knowledge production and social transformation. Particular attention is given to experimental pedagogies, artist-led infrastructures, and collaborative platforms that reconfigure relationships between art, community, and scholarship.
By bringing together scholars and practitioners working across art history, visual studies, African studies, and Black studies, the panel advances a cross-disciplinary conversation on the role of visuality in shaping ethical and political life. It proposes the study of visual dynamics as a critical intervention into African studies, offering new conceptual tools for understanding how images, objects, and spatial practices participate in the formation of Black futures.
Please submit abstracts to Raél Salley (rsalley01@mica.edu) by September 12.
