In conjunction with the opening of the exhibition Troy Montes-Michie: Rock of Eye at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, CA, we were proud to present a conversation between the artist and Professor Tina Campt, the Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Culture at Brown University and contributor to the exhibition’s accompanying eponymous publication. We encourage you to listen to the conversation on the relationships between borderland geographies and subjectivity, on the strategies of seeing and being seen in Black & queer bodies, and the legacies of resistance in histories of self-fashioning.

Visual artist Troy Montes Michie was born and raised in El Paso, Texas. He received his B.F.A. from the University of Texas at El Paso and his M.F.A. from the Yale School of Art. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Shed, the New Museum, The Momentary, the VCU Institute of Contemporary Art, the Metropolitan Arts Centre Belfast, the New Museum, the Contemporary Arts Museum-Houston, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY. His work is a part of the public collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Ulster Museum in Belfast. He is the recipient of an Art Matters grant and has participated in residencies at Recess Art, the Skowhegan School of Painting, and the Fine Arts Work Center. As a 2020-21 Hodder Fellow at Princeton, he researched self-fashioning and camouflage theory as a guide to describe the ways in which bodies can become alternately erased and fetishized, made invisible and hyper-visible.

Tina Campt is a Black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art and is currently on faculty at Brown University where she leads the Black Visualities Initiative at the Cogut Institute for Humanities and is the founding convenor of the Practicing Refusal Collective and the Sojourner Project. Campt is the author of four books: Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (University Michigan Press, 2004); Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe (Duke University Press, 2012); Listening to Images (Duke University Press, 2017), and most recently, A Black Gaze (MIT Press, 2021). She has held faculty positions at the Technical University of Berlin, the University of California, Santa Cruz, Duke University, and Barnard College.