The Department of Art, Art History & Design at the University of Notre Dame is pleased to present a visiting artist lecture by internationally-renown painter Michael Ray Charles on Thursday, September 9, 2010 at 7:30pm in the Annenberg Auditorium at the Snite Museum of Art.
Michael Ray Charles uses unsettling images culled from early 20th century advertising and popular culture to address persistent stereotypes about race, class, and gender. His appropriation of images and tropes that our culture would rather forget—Sambo, blackface, and Aunt Jemima among them—reaches into our collective past, reveals old biases that take new forms in our present, and reminds us of the ongoing struggle for equity and social justice. As writer and artist Calvin Reid wrote in his 1997 catalog essay Air Sambo: “Charles’s paintings force us to think, recreating the visual language of American racial ignominy, isolating its historical development and extracting a measure of hard-won insight into the bleak and lingering manifestations of pop cultural bigotry within the national consciousness.”
Charles was a featured artist in the first season of the award-winning PBS series Art 21: Art in the 21st Century and his work has been exhibited throughout the U.S. and Europe, including exhibitions at Cotthem Gallery, Brussels, Belgium; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, NY; Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, OH; Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; and Galerie Hans Mayer, Dusseldorf, Germany.
He is Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Texas, Austin.
More information about Michael Ray Charles (including interviews, biographical information, and images of his work and studio) can be found at: http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/charles/index.html
This event is free and open to the public.