Title: Dragging Away: Queer Abstraction in Contemporary Art

Th, Sept. 29, 5:30 p.m.

Lex Morgan Lancaster

Assistant Professor of Art History and Gallery Director, USC Upstate

Lex Lancaster Ph.D. will discuss their book, Dragging Away: Queer Abstraction in Contemporary Art (Duke University Press, 2022), highlighting how contemporary queer tactics of abstraction drag on difficult visual forms and histories of modernism. Lancaster will discuss how particular formalist investments—such as the hard edge, the grid, or chromatic play—can expose the potential difficulties and violence of abstraction for those who are marked by difference, while at the same time transforming those tactics to make them work for queer, feminist, non-binary, and anti-racist art practices.

Bio:

Lex Morgan Lancaster (they/them) is a scholar and curator who focuses on queer, feminist, trans, and anti-racist visual and theoretical contributions to the field of contemporary art. Their essays published in Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture and ASAP Journal, and their book just published by Duke University Press, all forge a queer formalist and materialist approach to abstraction in contemporary art. Lancaster is Assistant Professor of Art History and Gallery Director at the University of South Carolina-Upstate. Lancaster earned their PhD in art history and visual culture studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2017.