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Visiting Artist Talk: Antawan Byrd
When: Thursday, October 29, 2026 at 5:30 PM
Where: Krannert Art Museum, 500 E. Peabody Dr., Champaign, IL, 61820 — Champaign, IL
Price: Free
How does photography make acts of listening visible and politically consequential? Drawing from his current book project, Antawan Byrd's talk, Being Seen Listening: Photography, Pan-Africanism, and the Public Square, centers on photographs of midcentury gatherings during decolonization and civil rights struggles. Rooted in art-historical inquiry, he engages a Pan-African archive of images that document practices of attention, encode fraught claims to public space, and circulate models of collective life. The talk explores how acts of public listening have functioned as both aesthetic strategies and instruments of state coercion, with consequences for how we understand political participation and assembly.
Antawan I. Byrd is associate curator, Photography and Media, at the Art Institute of Chicago. Since joining the museum in 2017, he has contributed to the exhibition Volta Photo: Starring Sanlé Sory and the People of Bobo-Dioulasso in the Small but Musically Mighty Country of Burkina Faso (2018) and curated and co-edited the catalogue for The People Shall Govern! Medu Art Ensemble and the Anti-Apartheid Poster (2019) with Felicia Mings. He recently curated Mimi Cherono Ng'ok: Closer to the Earth, Closer to My Own Body, the first solo presentation in the United States of the Kenyan-born photographer.
Antawan specializes in modern and contemporary art of Africa and the African diaspora with a particular focus on histories of photography, sound, urbanism, and popular culture. In addition to his role at the museum, he serves as assistant professor of art history at Northwestern University. He received the Award for Curatorial Excellence from the Arts Council of the African Studies Association in 2017, and his research has been supported by an Andrew Mellon-CLIR fellowship, a Mellon-COSI fellowship, and a Fulbright fellowship.
Part of the School of Art & Design Visiting Artists series.
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