Vacant Stares: Adrienne Brown on Rethinking Urban Emptiness

Vacancy has been a key framework for picturing the modern metropolis. From the more recent romanticization of Detroit "ruin porn" to older forms of documentary realism conjuring the forlorn melancholy of abandonment, we've inherited a fairly standard descriptive language and visual grammar for urban vacancy and emptiness. This talk brings together artworks that challenge familiar representations of urban vacancy and offer new ways of understanding and relating to urban space beyond narratives of repair or redevelopment.

Programs are open to all, on a first-come first-served basis. RSVPs not required, but appreciated.

About the Speaker:

Adrienne Brown is Professor in the Departments of English and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago and the Director of Arts + Public Life, a hub for artistic exploration, expression, and exchange that fosters neighborhood vibrancy on Chicago’s South Side. She is co-editor with Valerie Smith of the volume Race and Real Estate (2015) and the author of The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race, winner of the 2018 First Book Prize from the Modernist Studies Association, and The Residential is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership, published by Stanford University Press in 2024.

Image credits: Thomas W. Harney (American, born 1947), Chicago, Illinois, from the series Stepping Stones, 2009. Gelatin silver print. Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, gift of Jean and Tony Ferrone. 2011.9.5.

Photograph of Adrienne Brown by Anjali Pinto.

The Block Museum of Art acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council.