Can I Pass?

Can I Pass? Firelei Báez and Erica Lord’s Trickster Interrogations of Racialization

Date: 29 April 2026 (Wednesday)
Time: 11:00am-12:15pm
Venue: Room 10.28, 10/f, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

All are welcome

How do artists of the African diaspora synthesize complex networks of cultural influence and relation in a globally interconnected world? My recent scholarship approaches this question through close analysis of artworks by contemporary Afro-Dominican artist Firelei Báez. Working across disciplinary boundaries, I consider Báez’s work in relation to Indigenous American art and theory, arguing that Black and Indigenous conceptual practices echo and complicate one another, especially in their grapplings with the shared ground of settler colonialism and white supremacy across the Americas. Through close observation of Báez’s painting series Can I Pass? Introducing the Paper Bag to the Fan Test (2010–2013) and Lord’s photographic works, the Tattooed Arms Project (2007) and the Tanning Project (2005–2007), I demonstrate how each artist challenges systems of legal and social racialization in the Americas through a shared practice of trickster methodology, inhabiting the edges of racial categories in order to unsettle their foundational logics.

Speaker: Aja Edwin Mujinga is a scholar of modern and contemporary art of the African diaspora who specializes in Black–Indigenous and Afro-Asiatic networks of relation. Her doctoral research, completed through the University of Texas at Austin, analyzes the practice of “trickster methodology” across artworks by Afro-Dominican artist Firelei Báez. In 2022, Mujinga was the Mellon Fellow in Contemporary Art at the Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas. Mujinga completed master’s degrees in art history and studio art at the University of Montana following undergraduate studies at Sarah Lawrence College. She was an assistant professor at the University of Montana Western for three years and has taught college students at the Kansas City Art Institute, the University of Kansas, and Avila University. She sits on the African Art Advisory Group at the Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City and has presented her research at numerous venues, including the College Art Association, the University of Colorado Boulder, and the Missoula Art Museum.