Lecture: Kirsten Buick, “Who Is Responsible for Remembering? Three 19th-Century Case Studies @ Visuality and Forgetting”

Kirsten Pai Buick is a professor of art history at the University of New Mexico, where she has taught since 2001. Buick specializes in American art, focusing her research on African American art, the impact of race and gender on the history of art, representations of the American landscape and the history of women as patrons and collectors of the arts. She has advanced scholarship of the work of numerous African American artists through publications, including the first book-length examination of the life and career of Edmonia Lewis. 

In a cultural climate where we are being actively encouraged to forget or mis-remember, this lecture argues that forgetting can be constitutive of visuality itself — that we must forget as the very condition of seeing. What does the slave narrative of James Williams mask, for example? What of Edmonia Lewis’s sculpture “Forever Free” or John Gast’s painting “American Progress”? Turning on the central question of “who is responsible for remembering,” each work resists illegibility by withholding the unspeakable and the unspoken. This program is presented in conjunction with the exhibition “Edmonia Lewis: Said in Stone.”

Buick received her bachelor’s degree in art history from the College of the University of Chicago and her master’s and doctoral degrees in art history from the University of Michigan. She was a predoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and a Charles Gaius Bolin Fellow at Williams College. Her recent publications have appeared in exhibition catalogues for artists such as Deborah Roberts and Augusta Savage as well as an essay on Renee Stout that appears in the catalog for the exhibition “The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture and the Sonic Impulse” (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts). Buick’s work has been included in anthologies such as “The Routledge Companion to African American Art History,” edited by Eddie Chambers, and “Race and Vision in the 19th Century,” edited by Shirley Samuels. She lectures nationally and internationally. Buick is a recipient of the David C. Driskell Prize for African American Art and was named a distinguished scholar by the College Art Association for 2022. Her second book, “In Authenticity: Kara Walker and the Eidetics of Racism,” is in progress.