A Witticism About Darkness: Racial Subtexts in Black Monochrome Painting will discuss monochrome abstract art with respect to the racial subtext of meditations on the color black in the modern West. It will focus on the overlooked oeuvre of African American visual artist Quentin Morris, who works exclusively in black monochrome, wrestling with the relation between what is black and who is black in every attempt to determine the meaning of black.

Jared Sexton teaches African American Studies and Film & Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2008).