The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage is pleased to announce that Linda Earle—a nationally recognized educator, administrator, funder, and curator—will serve as our 2021 Visiting Scholar. Her engagement with the Center will focus on the topic of contemporary Black cultural production. Earle is a professor of practice in fine arts management and the associate graduate director for the arts management MA at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture. Throughout her career, she has been an advocate for inclusion, freedom of expression, and development of new platforms for cultural practice, participation, and discourse.
As Visiting Scholar, Earle will organize a series of conversations with Center constituents, staff, and thinking partners considering how Black archives can serve as a framework for a multivalent exploration of Black cultural production. The conversations will center on three primary themes:
- Artists’ Engagement with Archives
A discussion of how artists have plumbed institutional archives to excavate and recover Black cultural narratives and create wholly new work that functions as institutional critique.
- Archives as a Resource for Black Curators, Scholars, Programmers, and Writers
An exploration of the ways in which Black archives have been an essential tool in expanding critical and historical hierarchies and in the rethinking of contexts, research methodologies, and critical approaches.
- Archives and Black Cultural Infrastructure
Conversations with Philadelphia cultural leaders on strategies for increasing institutional archival capacity, sharing, and access.
Earle’s work with the Center is a continuation of our Visiting Artist and Scholar program, which has included Kristy Edmunds of the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA; writer, director, and actor Ain Gordon; and technologist Dr. Suse Anderson of The George Washington University. The program is part of the Center’s knowledge-sharing and capacity-building initiatives that engage noted field leaders and thinkers in an exchange of ideas about issues critical to artistic practice. The program also fosters the connection of Philadelphia’s cultural community with peers nationally and internationally.