On “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power”

This November, the de Young Museum will open the internationally acclaimed exhibition, Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, 1963–1983, organized by the Tate Modern. This powerful and provocative presentation focuses on art made in the pivotal decades between 1963 and 1983, when issues of race and identity dominated and defined both public and private discourse.

To celebrate Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, the exhibition’s Co-Curator Mark Godfrey, will discuss the exhibition with Art Practice Professor Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle.

Mark Godfrey is Senior Curator of International Art at Tate Modern, London, where he co-curated the exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power with Zoe Whitley (Curator, International Art). At Tate, he has curated and co-curated retrospectives of Roni Horn, Francis Alys, Alighiero Boetti, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Franz West, Richard Hamilton and Olafur Eliasson, and is currently at work on a forthcoming Philip Guston exhibition. Outside Tate, he has curated shows by R.H. Quaytman, David Hammons, Christopher Williams and is currently at work on a project with Laura Owens. His books include Abstraction and the Holocaust (Yale, 2007) and he was the winner of the Absolut Prize for Art Criticism.

Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle is an interdisciplinary visual artist, writer and performer. Her practice fluctuates between collaborations and participatory projects with alternative gallery spaces within various communities to projects that are intimate and based upon her private experiences in relationship to historical events and contexts. A term that has become a mantra for her practice is the “Historical Present,” as she examines the residue of history and how it affects our contemporary world perspective. Her artwork and experimental writing has been exhibited and performed at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Project Row Houses, The Hammer Museum, The Museum of Art at The University of New Hampshire, The Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco, The Made in LA 2012 Biennial, The BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK and Páramo Galeria, Guadalajara, Mexico. Hinkle’s work has been reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Artforum, Hyperallergic, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post and The New York Times. She is also the recipient of several awards including: The Cultural Center for Innovation’s Investing in Artists Grant, Social Practice in Art (SPart-LA), Jacob K Javits Fellowship for Graduate Study, The Fulbright Fellowship, and The Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artists Award. Her writing has appeared in Not That But This, Obsidian Journal, Among Margins: Critical & Lyrical Writing on Aesthetics. Hinkle is the author of Kentifrications Convergent Truths & Realities published by Occidental College and Sming Sming Books and SIR published by Litmus Press. Hinkle is currently an Assistant Professor of Painting at UC Berkeley’s Department of Art Practice.