Join us for a Book Launch and with Author & Professor Leigh Raiford in conversation with Artist Sadie Barnette and Curator Key Jo Lee about Dr. Raiford’s new book When Home is a Photograph: Blackness & Belonging in the World. The discussion will be followed by a reception and book signing.

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Admission to this program is included with tickets to ENGAGE! Art, Blackness & the Universe.

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About the Book

In When Home Is a Photograph, Leigh Raiford asks how Black people use photography to make a home in the world. Raiford focuses on a selection of Black American activists and artists, including Marcus Garvey, James Van Der Zee, Eslanda Goode Robeson, and Kathleen Neal Cleaver, to explore the complex relationship between racialized subjects and the medium of photography. As they traveled the world for study, work, pleasure, or survival, these artists and activists took and collected photographs to express their political platforms and personal sense of self. Raiford considers the everyday image-making practices these Black Americans employed to improve the condition of Black lives globally by imagining, identifying, inhabiting, leaving, defending, and even destroying “home.” When Home Is a Photograph shows that these figures did not merely use photography to situate themselves in the world—they demonstrated how photography itself serves as a means of mediating one’s relationship to it.

About the Speakers

Leigh Raiford is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches, researches, curates, and writes about Black visuality and world-making. She is the author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (2011) and co-author, with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, and Laura Wexler, of Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography (2024), among other publications. Raiford has also written essays on the work of numerous contemporary artists, including Dawoud Bey, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya. She serves as Series Editor, alongside Sarah Elizabeth Lewis and Deborah Willis, for Vision and Justice, an imprint of Aperture Books. In 2026, she was named the Genevieve Young Fellow in Writing by the Gordon Parks Foundation.
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Sadie Barnette is an artist working across a wide range of visual media, often simultaneously. She was born and raised in Oakland, California, and holds a BFA from CalArts and an MFA from UC San Diego. Her work is influenced by the history of conceptual art, Bay Area rap, anxiety, car culture, and Hello Kitty. Barnette’s work has recently been featured in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Studio Museum in Harlem; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, among many others. She is represented by Jessica Silverman Gallery. Her honors include grants and residencies from the Studio Museum in Harlem, a United States Artists Fellowship, UC Berkeley’s Black Studies Collaboratory, and a 2026 Creative Capital Fellowship. She lives in Oakland, California.
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Key Jo Lee is Chief of Curatorial Affairs and Public Programs at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), where she collaborates with artists to explore Blackness, perception, cosmology, interior life, and the futures museums have yet to fully imagine. With more than a decade of experience in the field, her work sits at the intersection of curating, theory, and institution-building, asking how exhibitions produce intellectual work and how care can be actively designed, not merely declared.

Her recent projects include UNBOUND: Art, Blackness & the Universe and Liberatory Living: Protective Interiors and Radical Black Joy. Previously, she was Associate Curator of American Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. She is the author of Perceptual Drift: Black Art and an Ethics of Looking, has written for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and holds dual MA and MPhil degrees in the History of Art and African American Studies from Yale University.

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This program is presented in conjunction with ENGAGE! Art, Blackness & the Universe which is co-presented by Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) and California College of the Arts (CCA), in collaboration with UC Berkeley's Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies.