A CONVERSATION WITH ARTIST AMIE SIEGEL AND PROFESSOR JASMINE NICHOLE COBB

Working across film, photography, and sculpture, Amie Siegel investigates value, cultural ownership, and image-making. In Vues/Views, her new double-sided work on view in Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial, 19th-century French panoramic wallpapers become a prism through which threads of power, privilege, race, and class are performed, both within the papers themselves and in the places they appear today.

For this conversation, Siegel speaks with Professor Jasmine Nichole Cobb, a leading scholar of African American cultural production and visual representation whose published writings trace the emergence of Black freedom as both an idea and as an image in popular culture. Together, Siegel and Cobb will consider the visual and social signification of panoramic wallpapers. The program will explore each of their approaches to questioning depictions of people, landscapes and cultures in material culture across time.