Wednesday Walkthrough: Jade Foster

Join us for a Wednesday Walkthrough – a gallery tour where artists, experts, researchers and academics give short talks in their field of expertise relating to the concepts explored in our current exhibition. This season, we are presenting a major retrospective of the late British artist Donald Rodney. This exhibitions brings together nearly all that survives of Rodney's work across painting, drawing, installation, sculpture and digital media with rare archive materials.

In this walkthrough, curator and art historian Jade Foster invites you to feel your way through. They will split their talk into three acts:

Oh, Sandwell

Jade will talk about the social and political landscape of Sandwell, the place Rodney was born and grew up in, by reading out loud a speculative fictional letter to Rodney as a fellow Black Country dweller.

Popular: The Status of the Icon

What makes a canonical figure canonical? Art historian Gregory Salter expands on how major art icons such as Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Richard Hamilton, David Wojnarowicz, and Andy Warhol, and popular cultural references such as the film Mandingo (1975) echo in the centre or periphery of Rodney's work and sketchbooks. Likewise, figures like the monarch Queen Elizabeth I, the actor Mr T, football legend John Barnes and athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos are up front and centre in his work. Jade will expand on how the notion of the icon plays into Rodney's work by considering the politics of tutelage within art schooling and how it becomes a key ingredient in canonisation and maintaining the canon.

Scenes of Subjection

Titled after Black feminist Saidiya Hartman's 1997 book Scenes of Subjection, where she discusses the theatre of Black pain in nineteenth-century America, the last act will explore how Rodney deftly explores the politics of imaging in relation to how the body and Black pain is on show, but also in doing so simultaneously exposes and reproduces the disease of violence in its multiple forms through the image, particularly the violence of the medical model of disability. Rodney's practice between 1982-1997 offers a new context to the phrase "laying one's body on the line".

Access

This event will be held in the Galleries. Meet at Reception.

Speakers will use microphones.

This event is wheelchair accessible.

If you have any questions around access or have specific access requirements we can accommodate, please get in touch with us by emailing info@nottinghamcontemporary.org or phoning 0115 948 9750.