African-American Artists Series

Deborah Muirhead
March 18, 2004
5 p.m. Stein Hall 129

Deborah Muirhead will give a lecture and slide presentation, titled "Claiming a Story: Abstraction and the Power of a Narrative" on Thursday, March 18, 2004 as part of the African-American Artists Series.

Muirhead's paintings, drawings and books are " fictional narratives that investigate historical invisibility." Her identity as an African-American descendant of enslaved persons, her research in genealogy and her interest in African-American literature and history, all form the basis for her provocative and richly layered work. She writes that her work "reflects an examination of history, identity, presence and absence." Her work combines fragments of text, lists of names, layers of wax, paint, and collaged pictures. Muirhead has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Hearst Fellowship, along with other national awards.

Artist's Statement:
"My paintings and works on paper are a collaboration of genealogical research, African-American literature and history. By bringing together these combined elements I create fictional narratives that investigate historical invisibility. These imagined and constructed narratives speak through poetic voice but the configured story offers the notion of authenticity. This attempt to render the notion of time and space inseparable, is what writer Mihael Bakhtin has called chronotope, a literary device that makes narrative events concrete by giving them flesh and blood."