“World”-Traveling: Black Studies Research In Relation

John Biggers, Family Ark (monochrome), 1992. Offset Lithograph, 29.5 x 49.5 inches. Brandywine Art Prints Collection, Benson Latin American Collection and Art Galleries at Black Studies, The University of Texas at Austin © John Biggers

August 29 – December 6, 2025

This exhibition presents art from the permanent collection of Art Galleries at Black Studies in relation to writing by the galleries’ curators, student interns, and faculty from the African and African Diaspora Studies Department. The animating principle is “world”-traveling, a term used by activist and scholar María Lugones to designate playful, willful movement between identities and points of view. Lugones’ pluralistic embrace of our multiple, ambiguous selves is a feminist praxis toward mutual understanding and care. As a practice, “world”-traveling functions much like the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at The University of Texas at Austin– as a site of learning, fostering connections between individuals, fields, and “worlds.”

The artworks in this exhibition and attending research excerpts by African and African Diaspora Studies professors explore issues related to landscape, place, lineage, diaspora, and belonging. The artworks—whether artist’s book, drawing, print, or painting—and text invites visitors to form a different relationship to site, either by grounding themselves in the actual gallery, by traveling in their imaginations to other worlds, or by transcending space itself. “World”-Traveling invites visitors to linger and braid their own knowledge and experience with the work on display, forging a vast repository of thought, practice and research.

Joy Scanlon, Curator

With research assistance from the Summer 2025 AGBS interns