Made possible by the J. Fred Weintz and Rosemary Weintz Art Lecture Series Fund, this series invites distinguished art historians from diverse concentrations each quarter to speak and engage with our students and the Stanford community, enriching the culture of art history and appreciation on campus and beyond. 

Before the Nude: On Anteaesthetics

Drawing on her book Anteaesthetics, Bradley’s talk begins from the proposition that blackness cannot be represented in modernity’s aesthetic regime, but is nevertheless foundational to every representation. Troubling the idea that the aesthetic is sheltered from the antiblack terror that lies just beyond its sanctuary, the book insists that blackness cannot make a home within the aesthetic, yet is held as its threshold and aporia. This talk focuses on a reading of Mickalene Thomas’s 2016 multimedia installation, Me As Muse. Whereas Thomas’s work, in this instance and more generally, has typically been interpreted and celebrated as representationalist, Bradley suggests that Me As Muse may be considered as an exemplar of anteaesthetics—as an inhabitation which is anterior to the racial regime of representation. Moving through the aesthetic innovations surrounding representations of the female nude predominantly in the 19^th century, the talk draws attention the ways in which black enfleshment problematizes the phenomenological and ontological conceits that underwrite the visual, sensual, and abstract logics of modernity.

Rizvana Bradley is Associate Professor of Film and Media and Affiliated Faculty in the History of Art and the Center for Race and Gender at the University of California, Berkeley. Bradley’s book, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (Stanford University Press 2023), was named a Best Book of the Year by Frieze Magazine. Anteaesthetics moves across multiple artistic mediums and forms—from nineteenth-century painting and early cinema, to contemporary text-based works, video installations, and digital art—in order to inaugurate a new method for interpretation, an ante-formalism, which demonstrates black art’s recursive deconstruction of the aesthetic forms that remain foundational to modernity. Bradley serves on the Advisory Board of the academic journals, October and Camera Obscura. Her scholarly articles appear in Diacritics, Film Quarterly, Black Camera, Discourse, The Drama Review, as well as The Yale Review, Artforum, e-flux, Art in America, November, and Parkett. Bradley's work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, Creative Capital, and the Andy Warhol Foundation. She was the 2023-24 Terra Foundation Visiting Professor for American Art at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin.

Photo credit: Cassidy DuHon

VISITOR INFORMATION: Oshman Hall is located within the McMurtry Building on Stanford campus at 355 Roth Way. Visitor parking is available in designated areas and is free after 4pm on weekdays. Alternatively, take the Caltrain to Palo Alto Transit Center and hop on the free Stanford Marguerite Shuttle. If you need a disability-related accommodation or wheelchair access information, please contact Julianne Garcia at juggarci@stanford.edu. This event is open to Stanford affiliates and the general public. Admission is free.

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