Leigh Raiford (UC Berkeley): “How to Represent Violence: Abstract Art and the Representation of Police Brutality”

Leigh Raiford is the author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (University of North Carolina Press, 2011) and is co-editor with Heike Raphael-Hernandez of Migrating the Black Body: Visual Culture and the African Diaspora (University of Washington Press, 2017), and with Renee Romano of The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (University of Georgia Press, 2006). Her work has appeared in numerous academic journals, including American Quarterly, Small Axe, and NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art; edited collections including Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply (University of Texas Press, forthcoming 2018) and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, (Harry N. Abrams Press, 2003), a history of race and photography in the United States; and news and popular outlets including Artforum, Aperture, Ms. Magazine and AlJazeera English online. She is an associate professor of African American Studies at University of California, Berkeley.