Join preeminent writer and scholar Fred Moten as he responds to Chris Ofili’s work and the exhibition “Chris Ofili: Night and Day.” Moten puts the artist into play with an ensemble of thinkers, musicians, and poets whose trajectories all converge in the space where Ofili’s “Blue Rider” paintings are displayed in the exhibition. Representative of a kind of contrapuntal pan-African groove, the internal and external antagonisms and entanglements of these figures’ rhythms, movements, and ideas—which are so beautifully distilled and disseminated in Ofili’s work—will be considered as devotional practice, anticolonial demand, and chromatic rebellion.
This public program is organized by the Department of Education and Public Engagement.

Fred Moten is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. Through poetics and critical theory he studies the aesthetics of black social life. In 2009 Moten was Critic-in-Residence at “In Transit 09: Resistance of the Object,” the Performing Arts Festival at the House of World Cultures, Berlin; in 2011 he was Visiting Scholar and Artist-in-Residence at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn; in 2012 he was the Whitney J. Oates Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and a writing faculty member at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; and in 2013 he was a guest faculty member in the Summer Writers Program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa Institute, Boulder, CO. Moten is Cofounder and Co-publisher (with Joseph Donahue) of the small literary press Three Count Pour.