{"id":13342,"date":"2026-04-20T07:10:36","date_gmt":"2026-04-20T07:10:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/arthistory.hku.hk\/?post_type=tribe_events&#038;p=13342"},"modified":"2026-04-21T08:01:57","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T08:01:57","slug":"can-i-pass-firelei-baez-and-erica-lords-trickster-interrogations-of-racialization","status":"publish","type":"tribe_events","link":"https:\/\/arthistory.hku.hk\/index.php\/event\/can-i-pass-firelei-baez-and-erica-lords-trickster-interrogations-of-racialization\/","title":{"rendered":"Can I Pass?"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2 class=\"fusion-responsive-typography-calculated\" data-fontsize=\"30\" data-lineheight=\"42px\"><em>Can I Pass? <\/em>Firelei B\u00e1ez and Erica Lord\u2019s Trickster Interrogations of Racialization<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Date: 29 April<\/strong><strong> 2026 (Wednesday)<br \/>\n<\/strong><strong>Time: 11:00am-12:15pm<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Venue: Room 10.28, 10\/f, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>All are welcome<\/p>\n<p><span data-olk-copy-source=\"MessageBody\">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 B\u00e1ez. Working across disciplinary boundaries, I consider B\u00e1ez\u2019s 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 B\u00e1ez\u2019s painting series <em>Can I Pass? Introducing the Paper Bag to the Fan Test<\/em> (2010\u20132013) and Lord\u2019s photographic works, <em>the Tattooed Arms Project<\/em> (2007) and <em>the Tanning Project<\/em> (2005\u20132007), 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.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Speaker: <\/strong>Aja Edwin Mujinga is a scholar of modern and contemporary art of the African diaspora who specializes in Black\u2013Indigenous and Afro-Asiatic networks of relation. Her doctoral research, completed through the University of Texas at Austin, analyzes the practice of \u201ctrickster methodology\u201d across artworks by Afro-Dominican artist Firelei B\u00e1ez. In 2022, Mujinga was the Mellon Fellow in Contemporary Art at the Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas. Mujinga completed master\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Can I Pass? Firelei B\u00e1ez and Erica Lord\u2019s 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13346,"template":"","meta":{"_tribe_events_status":"","_tribe_events_status_reason":"","footnotes":""},"tags":[],"tribe_events_cat":[360,22,17],"class_list":["post-13342","tribe_events","type-tribe_events","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tribe_events_cat-2025-2026","tribe_events_cat-academic-talk","tribe_events_cat-seminars","cat_2025-2026","cat_academic-talk","cat_seminars"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arthistory.hku.hk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/13342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arthistory.hku.hk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arthistory.hku.hk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/tribe_events"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arthistory.hku.hk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/arthistory.hku.hk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/13342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13356,"href":"https:\/\/arthistory.hku.hk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/13342\/revisions\/13356"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arthistory.hku.hk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arthistory.hku.hk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arthistory.hku.hk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13342"},{"taxonomy":"tribe_events_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arthistory.hku.hk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events_cat?post=13342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}