Art & Art History ETDs

Publication Date

7-29-2025

Abstract

“…stay on it…”/a theory///“illumination happens”// is a critical engagement with the work of contemporary Black artists Arthur Jafa and Adam Pendleton, explored through the lens of the Black radical tradition. Bridging aesthetics, politics, and history, the dissertation investigates how their visual, sonic, and conceptual practices articulate Black life, insurgency, and imagination.

Drawing on theorists such as Fred Moten, Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, Frantz Fanon, and Cedric Robinson, the study constructs a framework that considers Blackness as an ontological, social, and aesthetic force. It examines how Jafa and Pendleton unsettle dominant epistemologies, staging acts of refusal and creation that resonate within and beyond the gallery space.

Part One centers on Arthur Jafa’s audiovisual poetics—particularly in APEX and AGHDRA—focusing on his use of rhythm, montage, and affect as forms of Black study and memorialization. His method of assemblage becomes a vessel for collective dreaming and political urgency.

Part Two turns to Adam Pendleton’s conceptual strategy of Black Dada. Through repetition, abstraction, and language, Pendleton constructs visual-textual constellations that challenge historical narratives and activate Blackness as both presence and refusal. His work reframes art history through the disruptive lens of radical Black thought.

Sound—especially The Roots’ Din Din Da—emerges throughout as a structuring logic, a way to think and feel.

Ultimately, this project frames Black art not as representation but as theorizing: a mode of staying on it, tracing illumination through the vibrations of Black radical aesthetics

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Art History

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

UNM Department of Art and Art History

First Committee Member (Chair)

Kirsten Pai Buick

Second Committee Member

Johanna Wild

Third Committee Member

Eva Hayward

Fourth Committee Member

Marcella Ernest

Keywords

art, interdisciplinary, black radical tradition, dada, collage, sound, visual, political aesthetics

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