“Studying for Opticality” Virtual Teach-In

Introduction | About the Portfolio | Opticality Research Project (2026) | Support

Introduction
On Thursday, September 10, 2026,  liquid blackness research fellow, Dr. Daren Fowler led a virtual presentation and Q&A on liquid blackness’s research portfolio, Opticality: Seeing in the Ways of Things (Spring 2026 event).

This Teach-In invites you into how liquid blackness studies and prepares for our artists and events. It puts the filmmaking practices of cinematographers Jomo Fray, Shabier Kirchner, and Autumn Durald Arkapaw, and production designer Akin McKenzie in conversation with cultural and political theorists such as R.A. Judy, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Julian Henriques, Katherine McKittrick, and Clyde Woods. It focuses on RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys (2024), Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock (2020), Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025), and Mati Diop’s Dahomey (2024).

“Studying for Opticality” Virtual Teach-In

About the Portfolio

View the OPTICALITY: SEEING IN THE WAY OF THINGS READING GROUP PORTFOLIO

liquid blackness portfolios are pedagogical tools for each year-long research project and artist event. Portfolios are built out of reading and screening groups where the liquid blackness team and our surrounding community of scholars and artists engage the aesthetic, conceptual, and disciplinary questions and concerns provoked by the artists, films, and theories of each research project.

Each portfolio is a rigorous expression of how we are thinking, preparing, and conceptualizing each event. Our hope is for them to be a guide and tool for those who wish to follow our work and practice more deeply.

Support

Encounters with the Black Arts”—designed for scholars, curators, artists, and the broader public to engage with liquid blackness’s research on the visual arts of the Black diaspora—is a three-year programming and pedagogical initiative of Liquid Blackness, Limited, supported by funding from the Mellon Foundation.