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Erin Gilbert Lecture: “Chakaia Booker: Transcendence and Transfiguration”
ICA Miami welcomes curator Erin Jenoa Gilbert, who will discuss her essay “Chakaia Booker: Transcendence and Transfiguration.” In this essay, penned for the forthcoming exhibition catalogue “Chakaia Booker: The Observance,” Gilbert argues that the peculiarity of the African American economic, political, religious, and spiritual conditions propelled by the American automobile industry informs Booker’s sculptural compositions. In 2018, Gilbert collected Chakaia Booker’s papers for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.
About Erin Jenoa Gilbert
Erin Jenoa Gilbert is a New York-based curator and art advisor, specializing in Modern and Contemporary Art of the African Diaspora. Exploring the relationship between art, power and politics, her curatorial practice examines the physical and psychological connection to land, the trauma of displacement, and the Black female body as contested terrain. Gilbert’s intersectional critical analysis exposes the fault lines in the aesthetic regimes that dominate visual culture, specifically by presenting artists whose contributions to the canon have been overlooked, particularly women artists from the “Deep South” and the “Global South”. Most recently the Curator of African American Manuscripts at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Gilbert has also held positions at The Art Institute of Chicago and The Studio Museum in Harlem. She holds a BA in Political Science and a BA in African and African American Studies from the University of Michigan, and a MA in Contemporary Art from the University of Manchester. She has published catalog essays on several Black female artists, including Deborah Roberts (Spelman University, 2018); Alma Thomas (Mnuchin Gallery, 2019); Chakaia Booker (ICA Miami, 2021) and Mary Lovelace O’Neal (MoAD, 2022).