The Clark Art Institute’s Research and Academic Program hosts a lecture by Sora Han (University of California, Irvine / Clark Fellow) in the Manton Research Center. The free talk examines the colonial law of the high seas and its various doctrines regulating everchanging natural borders between land and water to inform a reading of the break between the oceanic of law’s words and how contemporary artists rearticulate them into other aesthetic forms.

The focus of Han’s lecture is Charles Gaines’s Manifestos 4 (2020) and Sky Box II (2020), which break the words of the infamous 1857 Supreme Court opinion, Dred Scott v. Sanford, with alternative rules-based processes of musical and sculptural composition. Breaking law conceptually offers a portal to a mystical realm of legal experience and interpretation beyond nomos into an arranging, translational field of black study.