Reggie Burrows Hodges
in conversation with
Davide Gasparotto and Bridget R. Cooks
Tuesday, October 27, 6:30 pm
Getty Center
1200 Getty Center Drive
Los Angeles
Reggie Burrows Hodges creates paintings that engage with themes of memory, labor, and power. Working in both intuitive and process-based modes, Hodges hones in on intimate, everyday moments that often evade representation. His scenes convey impressions of experience—shifting light, a particular affective charge—through soft, gestural marks that evoke the hazy quality of recollection. Hodges complicates the association of negative space with emptiness by building out his compositions from black grounds. This first layer gives form and substance to his figures, their contours implied through lushly rendered environments. The artist’s descriptive focus on his subjects’ surroundings emphasizes the historical and social conditions that shape subjectivity.
Dr. Bridget R. Cooks is a scholar and curator of American art. Her research focuses on visual art by African Americans, Black visual culture, and museum criticism. She serves as Chancellor’s Fellow and Professor of African American Studies and Art History at the University of California, Irvine. She is core faculty in the PhD Programs in Visual Studies and Culture and Theory. Her books, articles, and essays can be found widely across interdisciplinary academic publications and art exhibition catalogues. She is most well-known as the author of the book Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (UMass, 2011), which received the inaugural James A. Porter & David C. Driskell Book Award in African American Art History.
