the street is our gallery

December 11, 2019 to December 12, 2019

Religious visions, public memorials, political effigies, historical tableaux and commercial signage found in the Black and Latin neighborhoods of America.

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A slideshow presentation and panel discussion with Naa Oyo A. Kwate, Lawrence Hubbard, Camilo José Vergara and Ben Katchor.

Wednesday, December 11, 2019 at 7pm
The New School
66 West 12th Street, room A407
New York, NY 10011

Looking at the photographic archive compiled over 40 years by Camilo José Vergara in the Black and Latinx neighborhoods of America, the panelists will consider the questions raised in Vergara’s interview “The Other Street Art?” (see below). The panelists will discuss the scope, meaning and appreciation of these street paintings and other graphic works. Free and open to the public.

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Participants:
Naa Oyo A. Kwate, Ph.D., Associate Professor, jointly appointed in the Department of Africana Studies and the Department of Human Ecology, Rutgers the State University of New Jersey. A psychologist by training, she has wide ranging interests in racial inequality and African American health. Her research has centered primarily on the ways in which urban built environments reflect racial inequalities in the United States, and how racism directly and indirectly affects African American health. Kwate’s research has been funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and by fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, among others.

Lawrence “Raw Dog” Hubbard is an American comics artist living in South Los Angeles. In the 1980s, Hubbard worked with writer Harold “R.D. Bone” McElwee at the Los Angeles headquarters of California Federal Savings and decided to collaborate on a comic about the wild stories of their friends and associates. Their comic series, Real Deal, was rejected by mainstream publishers, so in 1989 Hubbard and McElwee formed Real Deal Productions and self-published Real Deal #1. They published six issues of Real Deal from 1989–2001.

Ben Katchor an Associate Professor of Illustration at Parsons, The New School. His picture-stories have been collected in a number of books: Cheap Novelties, The Pleasures of Urban Decay; Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories; The Cardboard Valise; The Jew of New York and Hand-Drying in America and other stories.

Camilo José Vergara, a Chilean-born, New York-based writer, photographer and documentarian who archive of urban street murals forms the basis of this event. Vergara’s photos can be seen here.