Artist Samantha Box in Conversation with Luke Williams

Event Details

Luke Williams is a scholar, artist, organizer, and critic of 20th and 21st century Black performance and visual cultures. His work, which spans embodiment, racial capitalism, and the aesthetics of the Black radical imagination, focuses on Black Diasporic art in the Americas and broader Atlantic world. Luke earned his PhD in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University. His dissertation, In the Black: Figures of Racial Capitalism examines the practices of four Black emerging artists in the California Bay Area as they navigate the pressures of racial capitalism in the art market.

Currently, he is an assistant professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at The University of Texas at Austin.

Samantha Box is a Jamaican-born, Bronx (New York City)-based photographer. Of Black, Jamaican, and South Asian Trinidadian heritage, she creates complex images that explore a multitude of questions around diasporic identity—how are cultures, knowledge, and identities transformed across borders? How can one define space-for-self within multiple diasporas?

Her images complicate received notions of a singular home or place or origin. Ranging across genres of self-portraiture, landscape, and still-life, Box’s layered and experimental work is at once alluring and challenging.

Box holds an MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from ICP-Bard College. Her work has been widely exhibited, notably in group shows at the Houston Center of Photography, the DePaul Art Museum, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, and the International Center of Photography. She has been in residence at Light Work and the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and has been awarded fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts, the Silver Eye Center of Photography, and En Foco Inc.

Image: Left, Luke Williams, photo credit Meghan Smith. Right, Samantha Box, photo credit Sasha Bush.