Littoral Law: The Cosmosis of Charles Gaines’s Manifestos 4 and Sky Box II (2020) with Sora han

In this Research and Academic Program lecture, Sora Han (University of California, Irvine / Critical Race Theory and Visual Culture Fellow) examines the colonial law of the high seas and its various doctrines regulating everchanging natural borders between land and water to inform a reading of the break between the oceanic of law’s words and how contemporary artists rearticulate them into other aesthetic forms. The focus of her talk is Charles Gaines’s Manifestos 4 (2020) and Sky Box II (2020), which break the words of the infamous 1857 Supreme Court opinion, Dred Scott v. Sanford, with alternative rules-based processes of musical and sculptural composition. Breaking law conceptually offers a portal to a mystical realm of legal experience and interpretation beyond nomos into an arranging, translational field of black study.

Presented in person in the Clark auditorium. This lecture will be recorded and available to view on this page and the Clark’s YouTube channel on March 5.

Image: Charles Gaines, detail of Sky Box I, 2011.