Evanston Art Center “In Focus” Lecture Series: Rebecca Zorach

As we watch (and perhaps some of us participate in) the long-overdue tearing down of monuments and—who knows?—creation of new ones, what art history has to say to our present moment may offer but thin slivers of insight. Yet what our present moment says to art history is that we must examine our investments, phantasmatic and otherwise. To what extent does our current understanding of “art” require a kind of order that can only come from “police”? What creative energies might the undoing of that tacit bargain liberate?

Rebecca Zorach teaches and writes on early modern European art (15th-17th century), contemporary activist art, and art of the 1960s and 1970s. Particular interests include print media, feminist and queer theory, theory of representation, African American artists, and the multiple intersections of art and politics.

Her most recent book, Art for People’s Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 1965–1975, was published by Duke University Press in 2019. She is at work on a new project that will consider the relationship of artistic and political agency to natural and social ecologies. She is a member of Feel Tank Chicago, is on the board of the South Side Community Art Center and South Side Projections, and co-organizes the archive and oral history project Never The Same with Daniel Tucker (never-the-same.org).