10/05/2026
What can an exhibition make perceptible that writing cannot? 💭
Dr. Nana Adusei-Poku will explore this question and more in the upcoming talk ‘Depths of Sorrow—the Aesthetics of Black Melancholia,’ at the Benton on Monday, October 12.
In her talk, Dr. Adusei-Poku considers what happens when an exhibition becomes a way of thinking—when ideas unfold through affect, historical reference, dissonance, and encounter rather than through a thesis stated in advance.
This idea is explored in-depth through the 2022 exhibition ‘Black Melancholia’ (CCS Bard Galleries), which approached melancholia as an aesthetic and perceptual mode, emerging differently across works through absences, opacities, postures, materials, and other ways of inhabiting and registering the world.
Nana Adusei-Poku, PhD, is Assistant Professor in African Diasporic Art History in the Department of History of Art and African American Studies at Yale University.
This presentation is one of three talks in ‘Conversations on the Nature of Contemporary Curatorial Practice,’ a three-part leture series in conjunction with the exhibition ‘Mavis Pusey, Restless.’ The lecture series is co-sponsored by the Kohler Lecture Fund for Art History at Pomona College.
Learn more and register to attend at the link in bio!
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Image 1: courtesy of the speaker
Image 2: Installation image (detail) from Black Melancholia, June 25 – October 16, 2022. Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. Photo: Olympia Shannon, 2022
