Artist Talk | David Huffman in conversation with Bridget Cooks

Join us for a lively discussion of David Huffman: Terra Incognita with the artist and UC Irvine professor, curator, and author Bridget R. Cooks. David Huffman: Terra Incognita is the first museum show surveying the artist’s Traumanaut series. Emerging from Huffman’s lifelong interest in science fiction, formalist abstraction, and social justice movements, the “Traumanauts” are futuristic beings that travel the galaxy in constant search for home. With influences from cartoons, the Black Power movement, and poetics of basketball, Huffman brings us into his celestial world.

‍David Huffman is an artist whose paintings are an amalgamation of the worlds of formal abstraction and social identity. He is often identified with the Afrofuturist movement. Huffman has been shown nationally and internationally at ICA, London; Iniva, London; The Studio Museum in Harlem; Miles McEnery gallery New York, MoAD San Francisco, Santa Monica Museum of Art; the Wattis Institute, San Francisco; YBCA, San Francisco; the San Jose Museum of Art; the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; Berkeley Art Museum; and the Oakland Museum of California, among others. He is the recipient of The Jacob Lawrence Award (Academy of Arts and Letters, NY), Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship, the Artadia Foundation Award, and the Barclay Simpson Award. Huffman’s work has been reviewed and written about in the New York Times, Art in America, Frieze, Artforum, Art Papers, Flash Art, Art on Paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, the International Review of African American Art, NY Arts, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and Art Journal. He is an associate professor of Painting, Drawing, and Fine Arts at California College of the Arts.

Bridget R. Cooks holds a joint appointment in the Department of African American Studies and the Department of Art History at UC Irvine. She works on African American art and culture, Black visual culture, museum criticism, film, and feminist and postcolonial theory.She has published more than forty articles as well as the award-winning book, Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (2011). Her newest co-edited book. Mannequins and Museums: Power and Resistance on Display, came out last year. She also has a long history of working in museums and curating exhibitions, including “The Art of Richard Mayhew” at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, “Ernie Barnes: A Retrospective” at the California African American Museum, the nationally touring exhibition “The Black Index,” and the exhibition “Lava Thomas: Homecoming” on view at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts through July 24, 2022.

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This program is presented in conjunction with the current exhibition David Huffman: Terra Incognita, on view through September 18, 2022.

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