Join us for a lecture by & conversation with the profoundly innovative artist, KING COBRA (documented as Doreen Lynette Garner). KING COBRA creates corporeal sculptures to explore methods of colonial torture and diseases spread by White Europeans during the transatlantic slave trade. Often made from silicone, pearls, synthetic hair, urethane foam, staples, steel pins, crystals, glass, and other materials, Cobra's sculptures expose the medical malpractice and pathological infirmities experienced by Black women in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. In recent work, Cobra has taken up whiteness. As Amber Musser writes, "Cobra, as a self-described joker, reverses Black objectification and woundedness by ripping apart white flesh and making it into a consumable product—meat. By placing it within the landscape of desire and commodification, Cobra lays bare the consequences of making whiteness not only visible, but material." 

Sponsored by the English Department and the Department of Black Study. 

KING COBRA's work features in Scientia Sexualis, a group exhibition at the Institute for Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (on view until March 2), co-curated by UCR faculty member Jennifer Doyle (working in collaboration with University of Kansas trans studies scholar Jeanne Vaccaro). KING COBRA is an artist, body worker, and filmmaker. Cobra will also be in conversation with Amber Musser at ICA LA on October 30.