Guests joined the NYU Center for Black Visual Culture at IAAA and SoHarlem to remember two great artists, David C. Driskell & Freddy Rodriguez. Their lives and work were celebrated by our esteemed guest speakers, Dr. Pamela Newkirk and Dr. Alejandro Anreus.

Author, award-winning journalist, and professor Pamela Newkirk, PhD, is a multifaceted scholar who has published a variety of works that present multidimensional portraits of African American life, and address the historical exclusion of African descendants in scholarship and popular culture. Dr. Newkirk will pay tribute to David C. Driskell (1931-2020), one of the world’s foremost scholars of Black art. Born to sharecroppers from Eatonton, Georgia, and the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina, Driskell became a celebrated artist, curator, collector, teacher, scholar, and mentor over a career spanning seven decades. Driskell believed in the importance of telling the stories of African American artists, and approached Dr. Newkirk with the idea to pen his life story in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2016 during the Black Portraiture[s] III conference, founded by photography scholar Dr. Deborah Willis. Read more in Dr. Newkirk’s essay, How Late Curator and Artist David C. Driskell Changed Art History Forever: https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/pamela-newkirk-david-driskell-rememberance-1202683648/, and view Lyle Ashton Harris’s never-before seen portraits of David Driskell: https://www.artnews.com/gallery/art-news/photos/lyle-ashton-harris-david-driskell-photos-1202683677/.

An Art Historian, Scholar, Curator, Educator and Artist, Dr. Alejandro Anreus is a global scholar recognized for his commitment to exhibiting, documenting and teaching the critical role of Latin-American, Caribbean and other underrepresented artists. He will pay tribute to Freddy Rodriguez (1945-2022) a pioneer Dominican-born New York artist, who lived and worked in the city his whole life. Committed to painting and the exploration of abstraction, he transformed the minimalist languages of the 1970s into pictures charged with history and questions, from slavery and neo-colonialism, to dictatorships and spirituality, critiques of the art world, and tongue in cheek celebrations of dance, music and literature. This talk will provide an overview of his life and work, as well as anecdotes of the man and artist by a scholar who was his friend for almost thirty years.

Date:  Thursday, April 6, 2023

Time:  5 – 8pm EDT

Location: Communitas America, Manhattanville Factory District

461 West 126th Street Suite 5W New York, NY 10027 // Virtual