Red Summer: Percival Everett’s American Landscapes

• Friday, September 22
• 4:00 PM
• Yale University Art Gallery, Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Lecture Hall
• 1111 Chapel Street (enter at 201 York Street)
• MAP
• FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Over a period of two years, starting in 2019 when he began work on his novel The Trees, Percival Everett made a series of paintings to commemorate the century anniversary of the Red Summer, a summer that saw so many lynchings in the United States. In the conversation and slide presentation, Everett and Crystal Feimster discuss the ways he uses oil paints, watercolors, and photographs of his own paintings to create portraits of an American landscape that is ever-present, but often conveniently ignored.

Crystal N. Feimster, a native of North Carolina, is an Associate Professor at Yale University in the Departments of African American Studies and History and the Programs of American Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is Head of Pierson College and the Associate Editor of the journal of Civil War History. Feimster earned her Ph. D. in History from Princeton University and her BA in History and Women’s Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of the prizewinning book Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching and dozens of articles and book chapters. She has published essays in the New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Slate. Professor Feimster is currently completing two book projects, Truth Be Told: The Battle for Freedom in Civil War Era Louisiana and Uncivil: Sex and Violence in the Civil War South.