Keynote for "Picturing the Black Racial Imaginary" Symposium
Clint Smith, PhD
"How the Word Is Passed: Reckoning with Our Past to Build a Better World"
Fri, Jan 26, 2024
6–7:30 pm | Leslie Cheek Theater
Inspired by the exhibition Dawoud Bey: Elegy, we invite you to explore the complexities of the Black experience in America and parallels between the past and present. Clint Smith will deliver “How the Word Is Passed: Reckoning with Our Past to Build a Better World” as a featured keynote for the two-day symposium “Picturing the Black Imaginary.”
Across the United States, innumerable places with direct ties to the enslavement of African Americans are hidden in plain view. The symposium and this evening’s presentation illustrate how the history of enslavement and bondage has shaped contemporary economic and socio-political landscapes.
Informed by scholarship, trips to different historical sites, and oral histories, Smith outlines how these sites resonate with history and reckon with—or fail to reckon with—their relationships to the past. Drawing on his award-winning book How the Word Is Passed, Smith illuminates how the past is an ever-present part of our current lives as well as a pathway forward into the future and how it challenges us as citizens to take responsibility to document, learn from, and account for this history.
$20 (VMFA members $15)
A free livestream option for the keynote program will be available. Registration via Zoom is required.
About Clint Smith
Clint Smith received his PhD in Education from Harvard University. He is the New York Times best-selling author of How the Word Is Passed and Above Ground. He is also a staff writer for The Atlantic. Smith has received fellowships from several prestigious institutions, including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. His essays, poems, and scholarly writing have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, the Harvard Educational Review, and many more. He is a former National Poetry Slam champion and a recipient of the Jerome J. Shestack Prize from the American Poetry Review. In his forthcoming book, Just Beneath the Soil, Smith will explore the little-known stories behind World War II sites, and discuss how they shape our collective memory of the war.
This project is made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art.
With additional support from
