De Buck Gallery will host a panel discussion on Saturday, June 18 in Saint-Paul de Vence as part of La Maison Baldwin’s 2022 International Conference on James Baldwin. The panel, Chatting with Friends of Jimmy, which features artist Zak Ové among other people who knew the author and activist, will take place at 3:45pm CET (9:45am EST) in the gallery and will be accessible via Zoom link. Register below.
Timed with the conference, artist Zak Ové‘s The Evidence of Things Not Seen is on view at De Buck Gallery’s Saint-Paul de Vence location from June 4 – June 30, 2022. Ové will also participate in the panel on June 18th.
James Baldwin was a close family friend of the artist’s father, British filmmaker Horace Ové, and stepmother, Annabelle Alcazar, who, during Ové’s formative years, served as a mentor and ‘honorary uncle.’ Ové notes that the writer was a “fantastical,” charismatic individual who motivated and inspired his younger self.
The exhibition features seven new paintings created in homage to the writer and civil rights activist, who lived in Saint-Paul de Vence for the last 17 years of his life. In these works, Ové draws on the writings of Baldwin, particularly his book-length essay, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, from which the show takes its name. The essay, which explores the state of blackness in America and the value of Black lives, notably inspired the artist.
The panel discussions at De Buck Gallery will take place on Saturday, June 18. There are two panels, and the second of which will be accessible live via Zoom.
PANEL: CHATTING WITH FRIENDS OF JIMMY
[REGISTER BELOW TO ACCESS PANEL VIA ZOOM]
Date: Saturday, June 18, 2022, 3:45pm
Location: De Buck Gallery, 50 Chemin des Trious
You’re invited to listen to an intimate (bilingual) storytelling roundtable among friends who spent time with James Baldwin at his beloved villa in Saint-Paul de Vence. Panelists include Luc Trizan, a local sculptor who travelled the world and then settled in Saint-Paul de Vence, where he enjoyed a collegial relationship with James Baldwin; Florence Ladd, a fiction writer, social critic, and psychologist, former dean of students at Wellesley College, liaison to the United Nations at Oxfam America, and director of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College who first met James Baldwin in Istanbul and maintained a fast friendship; artist Zak Ové whose current show at De Buck Gallery Saint-Paul de Vence, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, brings together new paintings inspired by the writings of James Baldwin, who was a close family friend and mentor to the artist via his father, the radical British filmmaker Horace Ové; and Francois Reynaud Boizard whospent many evenings around the Welcome Table with her then-husband, James Baldwin’s personal physician.
BALDWIN’S THEOLOGY OF DECOLONIAL LOVE: BEYOND RELIGIOUS EXCLUSIVISM
Date: Saturday June 18, 2022 9-11am
Location: De Buck Gallery, 50 Chemin des Trious
This panel, which will take place in the gallery, focuses on James Baldwin’s theology of love, a theology that goes beyond the Christianity of his early years. Joining this panel will be Emanuela Maltese, a Ph.D. student in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Charles University in Prague whose research focuses on a postcolonial re-reading of James Baldwin’s oeuvre; Marissa Mira, a trans and queer person who is a Master of Divinity student at Harvard Divinity School and focuses on liberatory practices and abolitionist ethics; Theresa Delgadillo, a Professor of English and Chicanx and Latinx Studies at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. The afternoon will conclude with guided tours of Baldwin’s Saint-Paul de Vence Villa.
