This is Brie Gorrell and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today’s conversation is with Johanna Faith Almiron, a longtime educator, organizer, and scholar currently based in Nyack, New York, and at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. Her award-winning scholarship on the visual artist Jean-Michel Basquiat has been featured nationally and internationally at major museums and galleries,including the Guggenheim, theMuseum of Fine Arts Boston, the Nahmad Gallery, and the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art. She has penned groundbreaking cultural criticism and essays in LitHub, ArtNews, Public Seminar, LA Review of Books, Hyperallergic, Rizzoli Press with recognition from the New York Times’ Shortlist, and Vanity Fair. She has taught at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, the University of Connecticut at Storrs, Cooper Union School of the Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.

In this conversation, we discuss the relationship between black studies and ethnic studies, the role of performance and movement in relation to identity and coalition building, and the philosophies and politics of black artists and creatives who’ve guided and influenced the political-intellectual journey of Dr. Almiron