In Conversation: Sherman Fleming and Kristine Stiles

In conjunction with the exhibition Sherman Fleming: Unsettled, please join us in the Lecture Hall on November 6th for a conversation between artist Sherman Fleming and Duke professor Kristine Stiles on Fleming’s radical performance and visual practice. The exhibition marks a long-overdue institutional recognition of an artist whose work has critically shaped conversations around race, trauma, and the Black body in performance art.

A cocktail hour will follow the conversation.

Kristine Stiles (Ph.D. 1987, University of California at Berkeley) is an art historian, specializing in the research, writing, and teaching of modern and contemporary art, as well as issues in violence, destruction, and trauma, race and gender studies, and feminism. Among the courses that Professor Stiles has taught at the undergraduate and graduate level are Global Art and Its Ethics Since 1945; Performance and Performativity; Art & Text: Conceptual Art; Trauma in Art; Introduction to Visual Culture; Theories of Visual & Media Studies; and Documentary Photography of the Nuclear Age. In recognition of her distinguished contribution to undergraduate and graduate teaching, Professor Stiles received Duke University’s Dean’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Mentoring in 2011, and the Richard K. Lublin Distinguished Award for Undergraduate Teaching in 1994.

Sherman Fleming (BFA 1975, Virginia Commonwealth University; MFA 1977, Hartford Art School) is an artist working across performance, painting, drawing, and printmaking. His performance work has been featured at a number of institutions, including the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis, and Franklin Furnace in New York. His solo exhibitions include Codewords, VIAP Galerie, Heerlen, Netherlands (2006); Watercolors, International Visions Gallery, Washington, DC (2001); and Big Rebus Paintings, Nexus Gallery, Atlanta (1990). A former artist-in-residence for Ellen Harvey Foundation, Venice, Italy, Fleming was awarded a 2013 Individual Artist Grant by Franklin Furnace Fund and was selected artist-in-residence for the African American Museum in Philadelphia Art and Social Justice Initiative in partnership with Rush Arts Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.