Kelli Morgan - Founding Executive Director, Black Artists Archive

This is John Drabinski and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a Mellon grant sponsored series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today’s conversation is with Kelli Morgan, who is Founding Executive Director of the Black Artists Archive in Detroit, Michigan. She earned her doctorate in Afro-American Studies at University of Massachusetts, Amherst and has worked as a curator and activist at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, and now directs the Black Artists Archive. In this conversation, we discuss the place of art and curatorial practice in Black Studies, the role of art in building community knowledge, and the significance of curation and aesthetic work for Black liberation struggle.