Michael Stone-Richards, professor of critical practice and visual studies, College for Creative Studies, Detroit, and editor, Detroit Research, presents the lecture “Negation and Disavowal in Spatial Politics” at 6:00 p.m. via Zoom as part of the Rice Architecture Fall 2020 Lecture Series.
Drawing on the work of Detroit artists Scott Hocking and Carlos Diaz, amongst others, in "Negation and Disavowal in Spatial Politics," Michael Stone-Richards explores the way in which erasure and camouflage in public space and monuments attest to the work or modes of political and cultural unconscious in racial politics and what he calls the politics of attention - the question of Why now? posed by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Michael Stone-Richards is Professor of Critical Practice and Visual Studies at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. He is the author of Logics of Separation (2011) and numerous studies in English and French on the critical theory of avant-garde / practice as well as on the poetry of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, J.H. Prynne, Paul Celan, and the Negro Spirituals. His current research bears on questions of pedagogy and the collapse of transmission in the art + design school of the 21st – Century, blackness and biopolitics, and the language of moral perfectionism in the work of Guy Debord and John Berger. He has been a Visiting Fellow in Critical Studies at Cranbrook Academy of Art, a Fellow at the Centre canadien d’architecture in Montréal, and a Fellow at the Alice Berlin Kaplan Center for the Humanities, Northwestern University. He received a Warhol Foundation Grant for his work on Care of the City.
Rice Architecture Fall 2020 Lectures are part of an initiative to acknowledge, understand, and act on systemic racism in the built environment. Invited designers, scholars, and activists will speak on the relationship between race, architecture, and, by extension, related questions of social equity, environmental justice, and gender parity. The aim of the lecture series is to foreground these issues in the school’s curriculum while more broadly fostering solidarity and action in architecture.
All lectures are free and open to the public. Please be sure to register online for each lecture to receive the link to join. For more information on all lectures and to register to attend, visit arch.rice.edu/latest/events and ricedesignalliance.org.
This lecture series is made possible through the generous support of the Betty R. and George F. Pierce Jr., FAIA, Fund and the William B. Coleman, Jr. Colloquium Fund for Architecture.
Rice Design Alliance’s Civic Forum is made possible through the generous support of the Humanities Research Center with additional support from the Texas Commission on the Arts. Funding also is provided by RDA Underwriters: Harvey |Harvey-Cleary, Tellepsen, W.S. Bellows Construction Corp., Hines, HKS, Inc., MLN Company, m Strategic Partners, TRIO Electric, and Walker Engineering, Inc. For RDA’s Houston Design Research Grant lunchtime lectures by awardees De Peter Yi (Faculty winner); Anna Fritz, Shree Kale, and Edward Liew (Student winners); and Sebastián López and Lene Sollie (Honorable Mention), please visit ricedesignalliance.org. The Houston Design Research Grant lunchtime lectures are made possible through the generous support of The Mitsui U.S.A. Foundation.
All Fall 2020 evening lectures are eligible for one AIA/CES Learning Unit. Rice Design Alliance is an AIA/CES Registered Provider of quality educational programs. Watch the lecture, download the pdf, and submit for credit.