The School of Art + Art History + Design is excited to be a sponsoring department for two UW Public Lectures in the spring 2025, featuring Christine Sun Kim and John Jennings. Both speakers will be guests for student engagement events in the School during their visit to the UW Seattle campus.
An Evening with Christine Sun Kim
Wednesday, Apr. 30, 2025, 7 – 8 p.m.
Town Hall Seattle
Berlin-based artist Christine Sun Kim discusses her wide-ranging practice around sound and language. Kim, who was born in California and is now based in Berlin, reflects on her experiences as part of the Deaf community, using performance, video, drawing, writing, and technology to explore how we perceive and understand sound. In her talk, Kim will delve into her work within various systems of visual communication, including American Sign Language (ASL), musical notation, infographics, and television captioning. With humor and critique, Kim illuminates the complexities of social interactions where language, culture, and access collide.
John Jennings: The AfroFuture Now
Thursday, May 1, 2025, 6:30 – 7:30 p.m.
Town Hall Seattle
John Jennings is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Riverside (UCR); an award-winning author, graphic novelist, curator, Harvard Fellow, New York Times Bestseller, 2018 Eisner Winner, and all-around champion of Black culture.
Afrofuturism began as a concept coined by scholar Mark Dery in 1993. It was his way of grouping ideas regarding how Black people used the technology of stories to deal with racial oppression, disrupted history, and the challenge of moving into a positive future. In recent years, we have seen an explosion of interest from various fields around the critical making space that we call Afrofuturism. Black scholars and makers have taken this term and pushed it into places we never thought it would be. Black speculative fiction has moved from the fringes to the center. Mainstream institutions like Carnegie Hall, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Lincoln Center, and The Smithsonian have all put a great deal of time, money and effort into lavish exhibitions and productions centered around Black creativity, politics and culture. In this lecture, John Jennings will explore the major themes in the Afrofuturism movement, track the timeline of its growth, and posit future possibilities around this vibrant and ever-changing way of seeing the world.
The UW Public Lecture series is a program of the UW Graduate School’s Office of Public Lectures.