Ja'Tovia Gary and Frank B. Wilderson III with Aria Dean

Publication

For each of its virtual conversations from 2020-2021, the Carpenter Center published a limited-edition booklet with an edited transcript of the exchange, images, and biographical material. These booklets are available for free as digital downloads. During the time of online gathering, this publication series sought to serve as a material record of Carpenter Center programming and an art historical resource for future scholars and artists. All nine conversations have been compiled in the publication In Conversation, 2020–2021: Dialogues with Artists, Curators, and Scholars, available for sale in-person and online at the Carpenter Center Bookshop. 

Ja’Tovia M. Gary (b. Dallas, TX. 1984) is an artist and filmmaker. Gary’s work seeks to liberate the distorted histories through which Black life is often viewed while fleshing out a nuanced and multivalent Black interiority. Through documentary film and experimental video art, Gary charts the ways structures of power shape our perceptions around representation, race, gender, sexuality, and violence. The artist earned her M.F.A. in Social Documentary Filmmaking from the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

In 2017 Gary was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Filmmaking. Her award-winning films An Ecstatic Experience and Giverny I (Négresse Impériale) have been screened at festivals, cinemas, and institutions worldwide including the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Anthology Film Archives, the Atlanta Film Festival, the Schomburg Center, MoMA PS1, MoCA Los Angeles, the Harvard Film Archive, the New Orleans Film Festival, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and elsewhere. She has received generous support from the Sundance Documentary Fund and the Jerome Foundation, among others.

In 2016 Gary participated in the Terra Foundation Summer Residency program in Giverny, France. She was a 2018-2019 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University. Gary is a 2019 Creative Capital Awardee and a Field of Vision Fellow.

Frank B. Wilderson III is professor and chair of African American Studies and a core faculty member in the Culture and Theory Ph.D. program at UC Irvine, and an award-winning writer whose books include Afropessimism (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2020); Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid (Duke University Press, 2015); and Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Duke University Press, 2010). He spent five and a half years in South Africa, where he was one of two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress during the apartheid era. He also was a cadre in the underground. His literary awards include The American Book Award; The Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award for Creative Nonfiction; The Maya Angelou Award for Best Fiction Portraying the Black Experience in America; and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. Wilderson was educated at Dartmouth College (A.B., Government and Philosophy), Columbia University (M.F.A., Fiction Writing), and UC Berkeley (Ph.D., Rhetoric).