Art in Dialogue: Placemaking Practices by Folk Artists from the American South with Dr. B. Brian Foster

Join  Dr. B. Brian Foster, an ethnographer and multi-medium storyteller,  and Lehigh University Art Galleries (LUAG) Curator of Education, Stacie Brennan for an Art in Dialogue discussion about Nellie Mae Rowe and the importance of her artwork and its intersection with Black southern placemaking practices. After a tour of the exhibit and a short lecture, Brian will join Lehigh Professor of Sociology LaToya Council in conversation. Time will be permitted for audience participation. Light refreshments will be served along with a book signing of Brian’s books I Don’t Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life and The Ghosts of Segregation: American Racism, Hidden in Plain Sight collaborated with award winning photographer Richard Frishman. The exhibit is located at LUAG which is inside the Zoellner Arts Center, first floor. The reception and book signing will take place on the lower level. Both floors are accessible by elevator and stairs. Parking is available in the Zoellner parking garage.

This event is offered in partnership with the Africana Studies Department at Lehigh University. 

Register in advance.

Advance registration is recommended but not required.

*This is a qualifying 5X10 event.
The 5x10, which reads as five by ten, is a programming series open to all Lehigh students with a specific focus on first-year students, their connection to Lehigh and introducing them to bLUeprint and the Five Foundations of Student Success. In a typical year, first-year students are expected to attend five programs during the first ten weeks of the semester.

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Dr. B. Brian Foster
B. Brian Foster is an ethnographer and multi-medium storyteller working to document and interpret the culture, folklore, and placemaking practices of Black communities in the rural U.S. South. For the last ten years, he has set his work in several towns and small communities in north Mississippi, where he was born and raised. Brian’s areas of expertise include the sociology of racism and race, place studies, urban/rural sociology, and qualitative methods. His perspective and theoretical orientation are rooted in the histories and paradigms of Black Sociology and the Black Radical Tradition.

Brian has written two books. I Don’t like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life (2020) chronicles the growth and development of blues tourism in the Mississippi Delta. His second book Ghosts of Segregation: American Racism, Hidden in Plain Sight (2024) is a collaborative photo-essay collection featuring the work of award-winning photographer Richard Frishman. Frishman’s hyperpixel photographs document vestiges of racism, oppression, and segregation in the U.S. (e.g., a set of double doors that once was a “Colored Entrance,” the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma), and Foster’s essays blend memoir and personal storytelling with ethnographic reporting and sociological analysis to offer piercing commentary on the realities and histories captured by the photographs.
Brian is working on a new book—Casino Town—which interrogates the cultural, environmental, and human impacts of casino development in the Mississippi Delta. He is also building an expansive archive of oral history interviews and photographs focused on the histories and placemaking practices of Black communities in the rural South.

Africana Studies at Lehigh University
Rooted in a long history of emancipatory and egalitarian political visions created by Black people throughout Africa and the diaspora, the Africana Studies Program affirms, argues for, and studies the full and complete humanity of Black people.Through a diverse faculty and a rich, interdisciplinary selection of inclusive and intersectional courses, Africana Studies enriches the Lehigh University curriculum by situating urgent contemporary dynamics of racial inequality, injustice, and violence within a broad historical context, preparing students to deal with contemporary challenges. The Africana Studies Program encourages students to discover cultural, artistic, psychological, social, and political resources for imagining more just communities in which all can flourish. At a moment when millions of young people are in the street affirming that “Black Lives Matter,” Africana Studies can provide an intellectual space for students to explore histories of racialization and racism to make better-informed efforts to combat racial inequality.