Ernest Cole, Photography and the Black Built Environment: A House of Stories
A talk by visiting scholar Dr. Warren Crichlow (York University)
Presented by the Departments of Communication and Urban Studies and Planning, and the Black Studies Project
Ernest Cole's photographs are widely recognized as a searing record of life under apartheid. This talk turns to their equally powerful attention to Black lived space, from South African townships to Harlem tenements and the neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Crichlow considers how architecture, roads, interiors, classrooms, graffiti, and homes become both subject and substance of Cole's artistry, and a vital lens on Black spatial life today.
Dr. Warren Crichlow is Associate Professor (Emeritus) at York University Toronto, Canada where he teaches cultural studies and education. He is most recently a co-editor of Spaces of New Colonialism: Reading Schools, Museums and Cities in the Tumult of Globalization (Peter Lang, 2020), and Curricular and Architectural Encounters with W. G. Sebald: Unsettling Complacency, Reconfiguring Subjectivity (Routledge, 2022). Read more about Dr. Crichlow's work below.
Thursday | October 1 | 12:30 - 2:00PM PST | RWAC 0104 (PEB)
Event Details
Thursday, October 1, 2026, 12:30 - 2:00PM PST - Ernest Cole, Photography and the Black Built Environment: A House of Stories with Dr. Warren Crichlow - RWAC 0104 (PEB)
Presented by the Departments of Communication and Urban Studies and Planning, and the Black Studies Project
Ernest Cole's photographs are widely recognized as a searing record of life under apartheid. This talk turns to their equally powerful attention to Black lived space, from South African townships to Harlem tenements and the neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Crichlow considers how architecture, roads, interiors, classrooms, graffiti, and homes become both subject and substance of Cole's artistry, and a vital lens on Black spatial life today.
Dr. Warren Crichlow is Associate Professor (Emeritus) at York University Toronto, Canada where he teaches cultural studies and education. He is most recently a co-editor of Spaces of New Colonialism: Reading Schools, Museums and Cities in the Tumult of Globalization (Peter Lang, 2020), and Curricular and Architectural Encounters with W. G. Sebald: Unsettling Complacency, Reconfiguring Subjectivity (Routledge, 2022). His "Prodigious Presence: After the Door of No Return" appears in the Spring 2023 issue of Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies: Special Issue on Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return at 20. His writing on film and moving-image installation includes Baldwin’s Rendezvous with the Twenty-first Century: I am Not Your Negro. Film Quarterly (2017) and (with Kass Banning) "A Grand Panorama: Isaac Julien, Frederick Douglass, and Lessons of the Hour." Film Quarterly (2020). Over the past twenty-years he has served on the Board of Advisors for WEDGE Curatorial Projects (WCP Toronto), a non-profit organization focused on exhibition and public programming of contemporary black Canadian and diasporic art; and The Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA Toronto), a public gallery focused on contemporary photographic, media and digital arts through exhibitions, public programmes, and related activities.
RWAC is PEB (the Social Sciences Public Engagement Building). See map below or visit UCSD Maps for directional support.
