Conversation | "The Stone Face": Black American Expats in Mid-Century Paris

Join acclaimed writer, Adam Shatz, for a conversation with Lynn Gumpert, director of the Grey Art Museum, that centers on American expat novelist William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face (1963) at La Maison Française at NYU. Reprinted in 2021, Smith’s work exposes the complexity of postwar Paris as both a haven for Black Americans fleeing racism in the U.S., and as a stage for colonial violence such as the police massacre of peaceful Algerian protestors in 1961. Discussion will focus on the community of Black American writers, artists, and intellectuals who experienced the politics of exile in Algerian War-era Paris.

Copies of The Stone Face featuring an introduction by Adam Shatz will be available for purchase.

Participants

Adam Shatz is the US editor of The London Review of Books and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and other publications. He is a visiting professor at Bard College, and the host of the podcast “Myself with Others.” Shatz is the author of three books: Prophets Outcast: A Century of Dissident Jewish Writing about Zionism and Israel (Nation Books); Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination (Verso); and The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon (FSG).

Lynn Gumpert has been director of the Grey Art Museum, New York University’s fine arts museum, since 1997. Among the more than 75 exhibitions she has overseen at the Grey are Modernisms: Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights from NYU’s Abby Weed Grey Collection (2019); The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal (2018); and Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965 (2017). In 1999, she was made Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.

Visitor Access & Registration

Please register to attend.

NYU’s Grey Art Museum and La Maison Française provide reasonable accommodations to people with disabilities. Requests for accommodations should be submitted at least two weeks in advance. Please email greyartmuseum@nyu.edu or call (212) 998-6780 for assistance.