All are warmly welcome to join us for this Lunch and Lecture with Professor Antawan Byrd, Hebdomadar’s Room, University of St Andrews, 12pm-3pm. Free but please sign up and let us know any dietary requirements here by 5pm on Monday 1 June.
Photographs documenting sixties-era struggles for decolonization and civil rights across Africa and the African diaspora reveal how individuals and communities entered political life by gathering in public squares to listen: to state authorities, dissidents, and to one another. Such assemblies often unfolded under conditions of surveillance and risk, even as they generated collective energy and power. Attending to the visible presence of sound technologies and the staging of attention in documentary images, this talk frames the act of being seen listening as both an aesthetic and a political practice within the history of art as well as a vital expression of Pan-African solidarity. Byrd’s talk further considers how contemporary artists elaborate and reactivate forms of assembly and mediated presence associated with the sixties, underscoring the decade’s continued relevance and impact on recent social and political upheavals.
Antawan I. Byrd is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Northwestern University and an Associate Curator of Photography and Media at the Art Institute of Chicago. His research and teaching focus on the art and culture of Africa and the African diaspora from the late nineteenth century to the present. He recently co-curated Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica (2024–2026), a major survey exhibition examining Pan-Africanism’s influence on culture throughout the long twentieth century. The exhibition opened at the Art Institute of Chicago in December 2024, traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona in November 2025, and will open at the Barbican Art Centre, London in June 2026. He curated Mimi Cherono Ng’ok: Closer to the Earth, Closer to My Own Body (2021) and co-curated The People Shall Govern! Medu Art Ensemble and the Anti-Apartheid Poster (2019), the 2nd Lagos Biennial of Contemporary Art (2019), and Kader Attia: Reflecting Memory at Northwestern’s Block Museum of Art (2017). He was an associate curator for the 10th Bamako Encounters: Biennale of African Photography (2015). In 2017, he received the Award for Curatorial Excellence from the Arts Council of the African Studies Association. From 2009 to 2011, he was a Fulbright Fellow and curatorial assistant at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, where he currently serves on the board of advisors. He is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the Graham Foundation, Chicago. Byrd is currently working on Being Seen Listening: Art, Pan-Africanism, and the Sound Politics of the Sixties, a book-length study examining the impact of sound technologies on art and decolonial politics across Africa and its diaspora.
Image caption: Unknown Photographer, Malcolm X Addressing Crowd At Rally, 1963. © Bettmann