Ornamental Blackness with Adrienne Childs

Today, we are joined by Dr. Adrienne Childs. Dr. Childs is an independent scholar, art historian, and curator. She is Senior Consulting Curator at The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. She is also the co-curator of Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest for The Phillips Collection. In April 2022 The High Museum of Art awarded Childs the 2022 Driskell Prize in recognition of her contribution to African American art and art history.

 In this episode, Dr. Childs discusses her new book entitled Ornamental Blackness: The Black Figure in European Decorative Arts, published by Yale University Press. She also shares some of her current and future projects with us. 

For more on Dr. Childs' work, see her website https://www.adriennelchilds.com/

To learn more about the Race and Regency Lab, visit https://www.raceandregency.org/

The Race and Regency Pod works as a dynamic sonic space to lend an ear to all things Race and Regency. Using the intimacy, accessibility, and fluidity of the medium, this podcast brings together the public, artists, curators, librarians, scholars, and cultural critics who share their passion for questions of race in this period. Unlike ideas and engagements that can often stay confined behind academic paywalls, this podcast facilitates space for community members, and connoisseurs of the Regency era to think together and build together. 

Listening with and to a range of people who speak in varied accents and tones, The Race and Regency Pod works as a practice in embodied scholarship. We imagine what enthusiasm and engagement sound like when directed towards sharing, community building, resistance, and self-expression. This podcast will house diverse conversations that expand the conception of the Regency era thematically, geographically, and temporally, by considering how we inherit formulations of race from this period and engage with them now.