Tue, Oct 15, 2024, 12:15 –12:50 pm Auditorium 140 Artist Talk Image Given the recent calls for museums and universities to decolonize their collections and curricula, and the contentious debate amongst scholars about precisely what decolonization entails, my book, When Feeling Becomes Knowledge: Fred Wilson’s ‘Un-Natural’ Histories, looks to the practice of renowned Black installation artist Fred Wilson, whose museum interventions, I argue, offer a powerful model for decolonial practice and historical knowledge. My book, (proposal currently under review at Fordham University Press), When Feeling Becomes Knowledge, argues that through his strategic arrangements of historical artifacts and works of art, Wilson not only exposes the interdependence of early modern epistemologies and the traumas of slavery and colonization, but significantly, that he makes these relationships strikingly present and physically manifest. Wilson’s artistic practice engages with the materiality of history itself, allows viewers to rethink their relationship to the past through performative encounters with its objects, and lays bare the tactics and legacies of western knowledge production. In four chapters, my book examines three installations from the early 2000s, Speak of Me as I Am (2003), So Much Trouble in the World-Believe it or Not! (2005), and An Account of a Voyage to the Island Jamaica with the Un-Natural History of That Place (2007). These three installations in particular are not only useful case studies to examine the relationship between early modern knowledge production (e.g. natural history), and slavery and colonization; but significantly, they demonstrate and perform Wilson’s compelling decolonial model at a critical and timely moment for scholarship and pedagogy.