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  • Conferences
    • BP Shifting Paradigms – Venice 2024
    • Enduring Blackness: A Decade of Black Portraiture[s]: Paris 2013-2023
    • Here + Now African and African American Art + Film Conference
    • Black Portraiture(s) I
    • Black Portraitures II
    • Black Portraitures III
    • Black Portraiture(s) IV
    • Black Portraitures V
    • Black Portraitures VI
    • Black Portraitures VII
  • Questions
    • Info for Moderators and Presenters
  • News
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  • Conferences
    • BP Shifting Paradigms – Venice 2024
    • Enduring Blackness: A Decade of Black Portraiture[s]: Paris 2013-2023
    • Here + Now African and African American Art + Film Conference
    • Black Portraiture(s) I
    • Black Portraitures II
    • Black Portraitures III
    • Black Portraiture(s) IV
    • Black Portraitures V
    • Black Portraitures VI
    • Black Portraitures VII
  • Questions
    • Info for Moderators and Presenters
  • News
  • Mailing List
  • Contact Us
Black Portraiture[s]

What is called the imagination (from image, magi, magic, magician, etc.) is a practical vector from the soul. It stores all data, and can be called on to solve all our “problems.” The imagination is the projection of ourselves past our sense of ourselves as “things.” Imagination (image) is all possibility, because from the image, the initial circumscribed energy, any use (idea) is possible. And so begins that image’s use in the world. Possibility is what moves us.

—Amiri Baraka, “The Revolutionary Theatre”, Liberator, July 1965

Black Portraiture[s]

Red Summers VR: Tulsa 1921, Corner of Archer Ave. Greenwood District, Tulsa OK 1921/2021, Bayeté Ross Smith. Archival image is courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Tulsa, Oklahoma
OCTOBER 3, 2025

Past Conferences

BLACK PORTRAITURES: SHIFTING PARADIGMS

Venice, Italy

April 2024

Enduring Blackness: A Decade of Black Portraiture[s]: Paris 2013-2023

Paris, France

May 2023

Black Portraitures VII: Play And Performance
Newark, NJ

February 2022

Black Portraitures VI:

Absent/ed Presence

October 2021

V: New York, NY
October 17-19, 2019
IV: Cambridge, MA
March 22-24, 2018

III: Johannesburg, SA
November 17-19, 2016
II: Florence, IT
May 28-31, 2015

I: Paris, FR
January 17-20, 2013

#blackportraitures

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