The Visual Culture Workshop (VCW) convenes the third annual Critical Visualities Conference in order to ask the timely questions: “What are the political dimensions of the affective charge between art and its audience? Between the critic and the art she engages? How does it feel to look ‘critically’ now?”

Now in its third year, Critical Visualities has grown into a major national conference, drawing top faculty from across the country in the fields of American studies, African American studies, visual culture studies, performance studies, media studies, and literary studies. Designed to offer the University of Michigan community an unparalleled opportunity to engage with these scholars in an unusually intimate setting, Critical Visualities incites new insights, new questions, and new collaborations for presenters and audience members alike.

As always, Critical Visualities is particularly attune to the ways in which our interdisciplinary work enables us to engage with current events marked by feelings of shock and urgency about ongoing racial injustice and gendered violence.

Speakers include: Sarah Bay-Cheng (Bowdoin); Kimberly Juanita Brown (Mt. Holyoke); Zahid Chaudhry (Princeton); Laurie Gries (University of Colorado); Nicole Fleetwood (Rutgers); and UM's Sara Blair (English), Vera Grant (Deputy Director, Curatorial Affairs, UMMA), Joan Kee (History of Art), and Lisa Nakamura (American Culture).

Thursday, March 28 [All events in Angell 3222]
9:30-11:30am | Panel 1: Absence, Abstraction, and Photography
Sara Blair (U-M), “Seeing Without Empathy”
Zahid Chaudhary (Princeton), “Aesthetics of Expropriation: Abstraction in Fazal Sheikh’s ‘Desert Bloom’ Series”
Kimberly Juanita Brown (Mt. Holyoke), “You and Eye in the Afterlife of Images”

1:00pm-3:00pm | Panel 2: Everyone’s a Critic! (What’s a Critic?)
Joan Kee (U-M), “Smile, Bitch!”
Vera Grant (U-M), “The Critic’s Tear: Disorder and Ordinary Flatness”
Sarah Bay-Cheng (Bowdoin), “Everybody’s Historiography: Playing the Digital in Museums”

3:15-4:45pm: Graduate Student Roundtable

Friday, March 29 [All events in Angell 3222]
9:30am-11:30am | Panel 3: Affective Aesthetics of Race and State
Lisa Nakamura (U-M), “Virtual Reality and the Feeling of Virtue: Women of Color Narrators, Enforced Hospitality, and the Leveraging of Empathy”
Laurie Gries (Colorado), “Trumpicons, Affect, and the Racial Politics of Circulation”
Nicole Fleetwood (Rutgers), “Carceral Aesthetics”