Join the Conversation
A series of conversations that help students and others broaden their knowledge of our complex world.
Hosted by Nicole Waligora-Davis, School of Humanities and Arts Associate Dean and Alan Dugald McKillip Associate Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing, Humanities NOW conversations are open to all Rice students, faculty and staff, and the larger Houston community.
Radical Art: Abstraction and Black Life—a conversation with Leslie Hewitt
March 9, 2026 | 12-1:00 p.m. | Kraft Hall, 130
What would it mean to have your understanding of photographs, objects, and histories reshaped? That is, to fundamentally see the world differently and anew? Artist Leslie Hewitt’s work proffers such a possibility. Her art invites viewers to look, and relook, and look again—and see differently. Whether working with photography, sculpture, or archival materials and ephemera, Hewitt’s art explores the layers and layered nature of black life, and urges a reengagement with history, memory, and the politics of representation.
Join us for a conversation with Leslie Hewitt, moderated by Eve Dunbar, on art as a radical practice of looking, of remembering, and of rethinking history.
New Waves. Installation view. Image courtesy of the artist and Perrotin, 2025.
Radical Art: Abstraction and Black Life—a conversation with Leslie Hewitt
Moderated by Dr. Eve Dunbar | March 9, 2026 | 12-1:00 p.m. | Kraft Hall, 130.
Leslie Hewitt, associate professor of art at Rice University, studied at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the Yale University School of Art, and at New York University, where she was a Clark Fellow in the Africana and Visual Culture Studies programs.