Calida Garcia Rawles: Bennington College’s Visual Arts Lecture Series

Merging sharp hyper-realism with poetic abstraction, Los Angeles-based Calida Garcia Rawles paints African-American women and men submerged in glistening water; bodies are swarmed by a flurry of bubbles, ripples, and refracted light. Her work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions and recently created the cover art for Ta-Nehisi Coates’s debut novel, The Water Dancer. Her work is in numerous public and private collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY.

Bennington College’s Spring 2021 Visual Arts Lecture Series continues the theme of “Race, Representation, and Contemporary Art in the Age of Black Lives Matter.” This framework for conversations with historians and artists whose work is deeply invested in questions of (political) representation, race, sexuality, gender, and class within the anti-racist praxes and historical and cultural awareness of the Black Lives Matter movement.

“Now is an ideal moment to experience, even remotely, art and scholarship that deepens our individual and collective understandings of what it means to be, or not to be, represented,” said Visual Art faculty member Vanessa Lyon, Professor of Art History and Director of VALS.

All lectures are free, open to the public, and will take place virtually over Zoom from 7:00-8:00 PM on Tuesday evenings.