liquid blackness Research Projects
liquid blackness Research Projects are central to our collaborative practice, our investment in mentorship and creating publicly accessible pedagogical and study tools, and our commitment to scholarly, artistic, and curatorial communities. These projects become the conceptual ground for our public events (conversations with artists, masterclasses, special screenings, etc.) and our publications.
liquid blackness research projects are undisciplined and best understood through a series of questions pivoting around (1) the relationship between aesthetics and the ontology of blackness and (2) the generative potential of blackness as an aesthetic. As we extend and confront lines of inquiry from a number of research fields, our approach is equally concerned with theoretical content, analytical methods, and scholarly praxis.
Each research project begins with an incisive study of a piece of art or artist that includes gathering biographical information, filmographies, interviews, exhibition histories, reviews, existing scholarly literature, and more. Leveraging the questions that guide all liquid blackness research, we create community by offering samples of aesthetic analysis, theoretical frameworks and bibliographies for future study.
Charts to Follow: Keeping Time’s Intergenerational Transmissions (2025)
Music Video as Black Art: Claiming the B-SIde (2023)
Figure/Ground: Abstraction and Object Matter in Kevin Jerome Everson's Artmaking Practice (2022)
Facing the Band: Elissa Blount Moorhead and the (Ana)Architectures of Community Ties (2019-20)
Jenn Nkiru's Panafrican Imagination: Black Studies as Aesthetic Practice (2019)
Bradford Young and the Visual Art of Black Care (2018)
Holding Place, Taking Flight (2018)
Figuring Suspension: a Study of Visual Recording Artist Storyboard P (2018)
Horace Tapscott: A Musical Griot with Filmmaker Barbara McCullough (2017)
Black Ontology and the Love of Blackness (2016)
Holding Blackness in Suspension: The Films of Kahlil Joseph (2016)
Passing Through: The Arts and Politics of the Jazz Ensemble (2015)
Blackness, Aesthetics, Liquidity (2014)
fluid radicalisms (2014)
Liquid Blackness on the LA Rebellion (2013)