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Conversation + Book Launch with Tiffany E. Barber + Dejay Duckett
Presented in-person and on Zoom
Join us to celebrate Tiffany E. Barber’s new publication, Undesirability and Her Sisters: Black Women’s Visual Work and the Ethics of Representation, published by New York University Press. Barber will be in conversation with Dejay Duckett, Vice President of Curatorial Services at the African American Museum in Philadelphia. This event is free and open to the public.
In the wake of contemporary art’s post-Black turn and the mainstreaming of intersectionality, Undesirability and Her Sisters charts a new genealogy of Black women’s art that exposes the unfinished project of racial and gender empowerment in the twenty-first century. Tiffany Barber argues that Black women’s social positions at the intersection of race, gender, sexuality and class are inherently queer, thus spurring unexpected aesthetic strategies that throw into high relief the ethical terrain of what it means to be Black and a woman now.
Registration not required for in-person attendance.
Dr. Tiffany E. Barber is a prize-winning, internationally-recognized scholar, curator, and critic whose writing and expert commentary appears in top-tier academic journals, popular media outlets, and award-winning documentaries. Her work spans abstraction, dance, fashion, feminism, film, and the ethics of representation, focusing on visual and performing artists of the Black world. Her latest curatorial project, a virtual, multimedia exhibition for Google Arts and Culture, examines the value of Afrofuturism in times of crisis.
Dr. Barber is currently Assistant Professor of African American Art at the University of California-Los Angeles. Prior to joining the faculty at UCLA, she was Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Art History at the University of Delaware as well as curator-in-residence at the Delaware Contemporary. She has completed fellowships at ArtTable, the Delaware Art Museum, the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, and the Getty Research Institute. Dr. Barber is the recipient of the Smithsonian’s 2022 National Portrait Gallery Director’s Essay Prize and author of Undesirability and Her Sisters: Black Women’s Visual Work and the Ethics of Representation (New York University Press, 2025).