Northwestern University Department of Art History presents the Warnock Lecture Series in 2025-26:

Fall 2025 Warnock Lecture

Adriana Zavala, Tufts University

"Reckoning and Rerouting: AfroDiasporic Returns in Recent Works by Carlos Martiel and Luis Arnías"

6:00 to 7:15pm

Wednesday, October 29, 2025

Pick-Laudati Auditorium, Block Museum of Art

This lecture will focus on two recent time-based works by Carlos Martiel (born Havana; based in New York City) and by Luis Arnías (born Caracas; based in Boston) both of which reinterpret the phenomenon of Black diasporic “heritage travel” to West Africa. While most of the scholarship on African heritage tourism to the slave castles and “doors of no return” in Senegal and Ghana focuses on the motivations and experiences of African Americans from the United States, this lecturer considers Martiel’s and Arnías’s interpretations of their returns, as artists of Hispanophone Caribbean origins, to raise new questions about the transnational circuits of Black diasporic memory and heritage.