The Visiting Artists Program resource guides contain upcoming speakers' biographies, articles, video and audio content, related publications in the Flaxman Library, and additional online resources. These guides may be used in the classroom in preparation for the event, research, or post-lecture discussion.
Fred Moten Lecture: Tuesday, April 12, 6:30–7:45 p.m. CT
Click HERE to join via Zoom
This event will be live captioned by Communication Access Realtime Translation services.
Join us live for a virtual lecture by theorist Fred Moten followed by an audience Q&A
Fred Moten is professor of performance studies and comparative literature at New York University. He is interested in social movement, aesthetic experiment, and Black study. Moten has written a number of books of poetry and criticism, including In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Hughson's Tavern (Leon Works, 2009); B Jenkins (Duke University Press, 2010); The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions, 2014); The Little Edges (Wesleyan University Press, 2015); The Service Porch (Letter Machine Editions, 2016); consent not to be a single being (Duke University Press, 2017, 2018); and All That Beauty (Letter Machine Editions, 2019). In 2014, The Feel Trio was a poetry finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was the winner of the California Book Award. In 2016, The Little Edges was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. That year, Moten was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Stephen E. Henderson Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry by the African American Literature and Culture Society. In 2018, Moten received the inaugural Roy Lichtenstein Award of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and was named a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow. In 2019, Black and Blur, the first volume of consent not to be a single being, was awarded honorable mention for the William Sanders Scarborough Prize by the Modern Language Association; the second volume, Stolen Life, was a finalist for the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. In 2020, Black and Blur received the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin. In the same year, Moten was named a MacArthur Fellow.
Moten is engaged in ongoing collaborations with critic Laura Harris, theorist Stefano Harney, and artist Wu Tsang (BFA 2004). With Harney, he is co-author of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2013), A Poetics of the Undercommons (Sputnik and Fizzle, 2016) and All Incomplete (Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2021); and with Tsang, Who touched me? (If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want to be Part of Your Revolution, 2016). With Harris, he co-operates Trespassage, a shared study space on the outskirts of New York City. Moten is also a member of Tsang’s performance troupe Moved By the Motion, whose work has been shown or performed at venues and for institutions including If I Can't Dance I Don't Want To Be A Part of Your Revolution, Amsterdam; Tate Modern, London; the New Museum, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many other venues. Moten has also collaborated with many other artists, artist collectives, and study groups, including Arika, Gerald Cleaver, Exodus Reading Group, Renee Gladman, Andrea Geyer, the Institute for Physical Sociality, Arthur Jafa, Jennie C. Jones, Brandon Lopez, George Lewis, Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective, MPA, Chris Ofili, William Parker, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Ultra-red, James Gordon Williams, Suné Woods, and Fernando Zalamea. He has served on the editorial boards of Callaloo, Discourse, American Quarterly, and Social Text; as a member of the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine; on the board of directors of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, City University of New York; and on the advisory board of Issues in Critical Investigation, Vanderbilt University.
Presented in partnership with SAIC’s Low-Residency MFA Program.
Portrait credit: Fred Moten. Photo: Robert Mayer
Fred Moten: An Endorsement of an Amicus Brief for Lanier v. Harvard
Fred Moten | Hyperallergic | October 27, 2021
Fred Moten Is Still Figuring Out How to Live, Just Like Everyone Else
Helen Holmes | Observer | July 15, 2021
Star Theorist and Poet Fred Moten Has a Complicated Relationship With the Art World
Helen Holmes | Observer | July 8, 2021
Artist Ralph Lemon and Theorist Fred Moten Win Vaunted $625,000 MacArthur ‘Genius’ Awards
Alex Greenberger | ARTnews | October 6, 2020
Fred Moten’s Radical Critique of the Present
David S. Wallace | The New Yorker | April 30, 2018
Every and All: Fred Moten’s Oneness as a Poet, Theorist, and Artistic Muse
Andy Battaglia | ARTnews | March 27, 2018
The Low End Theory: Fred Moten’s subversive black-studies scholarship
Jesse McCarthy | Harvard Magazine | January–February 2018
All That Beauty by 
The Universal Machine by 
Black and Blur by 
A Poetics of the Undercommons by 
The Service Porch by 
Who Touched Me? by 
The Little Edges by 
The Undercommons by 
B Jenkins by 
In the Break by 2020 MacArthur Fellow: Cultural Theorist and Poet
Fred Moten’s profile in the MacArthur Fellows Program Class of 2020.
NYU Faculty Profile
Fred Moten is Professor in the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.
Visiting Artists Program Lecture Recordings from the Archive
SAIC Visiting Artists Program video and audio lecture recordings (1977–present.) Available with SAIC login credentials.
SAIC Digital Collections: Visiting Artists Program
SAIC Visiting Artists Program publicity archive and audio recordings (1977-98).
