FQT Podcast

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Kellie Jones, Professor in Art History and Archaeology and the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University.  Professor Jones is a 2016 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of numerous awards for her scholarship and curation.  Professor Jones is the author of EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (Duke, 2011), and South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (Duke, 2017), which was named a Best Art Book of 2017 in The New York Times. She has worked as a curator for over three decades and her exhibition “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980,” at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, was named one of the best exhibitions of 2011 and 2012 by Artforum, and the best thematic show nationally by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).  Professor Jones discusses her extensive scholarship and exhibition curation, growing up embedded in a remarkable artistic community in New York City, the influence of her friends, neighbors and especially her parents, esteemed poets Amiri Baraka and Hettie Jones on her life and work.   Music Credit: Ornette Coleman, Eventually

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Huey Copeland, Andrew W. Mellon Chair and Professor of Modern Art and Black Study at the University of Pittsburgh, about his work in art history, criticism, and Black diasporic and contemporary art.  Professor Copeland is the author of the critically acclaimed book Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (Chicago, 2013), co-editor of the award-winning volume Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World (National Gallery of Art and Yale University Press, 2023), as well over 70 essays, interviews, and reviews that have appeared in a range of journals and exhibition catalogues, including Artforum International, Histórias Afro-Atlânticas: Antologia, Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, Nka, and Represenations.   Music Credit: Grace Jones, Pull Up to the Bumper

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with poet and professor Tracy K. Smith.  Smith served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States, and her book of poetry Life on Mars (Greywolf Press, 2011) received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize.  Smith is Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute as well as professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.  Smith discusses her numerous works of poetry, and her recent, more essayistic book, To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul (Penguin, 2023), the poetics of blackness, the significance of the ancestral for her life and work and how her critical inhabitation of spirituality shapes her work.

This 2022 podcast episode is a conversation between Maria Murphy (then associate director of the FQT Center) and Lane Timothy Speidel, Philadelphia artist, musician, writer, and Gender Jawn's podcast producer. In their new exhibition at Vox Populi Gallery, ALL EXITS, Lane Speidel lets us into the backstage of the mind. Sculptures and paintings create a night that is a frozen dream where we can all get lost, take off our underwear, and quit our jobs. Saggy, their music project is deeply discussed, as well as many references from their life practice of surrender. Satre, insomnia, perspectival painting, strikes, and cat accents are all mentioned.    Songs by Saggy in order are:  "big big sky" (2022)  "I can look however I want and I still get to tell you who I am" (2018)  "I hate time" (2018)  "Anti-Work" (2022)  "Clover" (2022)    Saggy is made of Lane Speidel and Jim Strong - as well as any others who wish to be included.  A limited list based on the episode's recordings : Billy Ray Boyer, Elliott Rosenfeld, Lydia Shea, Schuyler Thumb, Jack, and Ian. More Saggy can be found here: https://ihopeilikethis.com/Saggy [https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/ihopeilikethis.com/Saggy__;!!IBzWLUs!VQZ4TJ3k5DtS9IEuwUmVs58kQ4rsR3CQo83OpxNT_Acb8HYn5eJMUvON6mThqSHBxIVncRzzR235KGhw2aVpfJ5YFQ$]

In this episode Che Gossett, associate director of the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania speaks with the authors of Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern UP, 2024) professors Steven Swarbrick of CUNY and Jean Thomas Tremblay of York University.  They discuss the concept of negative life, the contemporary politics of ecocriticism, film theory, psychoanalysis, and queer studies.    Music Credit: The Day the World Turned Day-Glo, by X-Ray Spex