"World"-Traveling: Black Studies Research in Relation

August 29, 2025 - December 06, 2025

Idea Lab - On Site Exhibition

“World”-Traveling: Black Studies Research in Relation, installation view. Idea Lab, Art Galleries at Black Studies, The University of Texas at Austin, August 29 – December 6, 2025. Photo: Mark Doroba.

One way ashore, a thousand channels.
—Édouard Glissant

This exhibition presents art from the permanent collection of Art Galleries at Black Studies in relation to writing by the galleries’ curators, student interns, and faculty from the African and African Diaspora Studies Department. The animating principle is “world”-traveling, a term used by activist and scholar María Lugones to designate playful, willful movement between identities and points of view. Lugones’ pluralistic embrace of our multiple, ambiguous selves is a feminist praxis toward mutual understanding and care. As a practice, “world”-traveling functions much like the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at The University of Texas at Austin– as a site of learning, fostering connections between individuals, fields, and “worlds.”

The artworks in this exhibition and attending research excerpts by African and African Diaspora Studies professors explore issues related to landscape, place, lineage, diaspora, and belonging. The artworks—whether artist’s book, drawing, print, or painting—and text invites visitors to form a different relationship to site, either by grounding themselves in the actual gallery, by traveling in their imaginations to other worlds, or by transcending space itself. Charles White’s Can a Negro Study Law in Texas (1946) depicts Heman Marion Sweatt standing bravely before a classical building suggesting the then-segregated University of Texas Law School. Sweatt’s heroic stance, right arm raised as if in victory, answers the title’s question in the affirmative. African and African Diaspora Studies exists today because of the efforts of forebears like Sweatt, whose legal battle for admission in Sweatt v. Painter was one of the legal cases that prompted the Supreme Court to overturn the “separate but equal” doctrine in 1950.

The interdisciplinary field of Black Studies—sometimes known as Africana Studies or African American Studies—has been institutionally sanctioned at UT since 1969 with the founding of the African and Afro American Studies Research Center, connecting the University to extensive histories of African and African diasporic knowledge production. Today, this lineage of scholarship continues within the African and African Diaspora Studies collective and other campus partners. “World”-Traveling invites visitors to linger and braid their own knowledge and experience with the work on display, forging a vast repository of thought, practice and research.

Joy Scanlon, Curator
With research assistance from the Summer 2025 AGBS interns