• In Town — Los Angeles and environs

Fabiola Jean-Louis’s photographic series Rewriting History places Black women into a surreal historical imaginary, sculpting the trappings of European nobility and colonialism onto Black femme bodies. Using paper as a symbol of freedom, she intricately crafts papier mâché period gowns for her subjects, inverting the historical depiction of women of color as disenfranchised, enslaved and unadorned into empowered and elegant portraits. She will be joined in conversation by Professor Tiffany Barber to discuss traditions of portraiture and Black aesthetics, historic revisionism and Afrofuturism, in a dialogue about the reparative work of artists and curators alike.