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Kalvin Schmidt-Rimpler Dinh

PhD supervisor: Tamar Garb, Paul Gilroy 
Working title for PhD: Symbols and Cymbals: Tracing Afro-Surreal Expressionism, c.1940-80

In 1988, the writer, activist and cultural theorist Amiri Baraka coined one of his many intriguing neologisms: “Afro-Surreal Expressionism”. Its design was capacious, encompassing art, music and literature across the twentieth century: the writings of Henry Dumas, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer and Toni Morrison; the music of Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and Sun Ra; and the visual art of Jacob Lawrence, Vincent Smith, and Romare Bearden. My project examines the genealogy of Baraka’s concept and tests it as a filter through which to interpret selected artworks and literary texts, with a focus on US-American contexts. Scholarship on the broader subject of Afro-Surrealism has leaned towards literature, an imbalance I seek to redress from an interdisciplinary art historical perspective. My overarching question, then, is how the visual field can illuminate Baraka’s provocation; and, conversely, what Baraka’s provocation might enable us to see within the visual field.

Publications

  • ‘Swarming city, city gorged with dreams’: Sound, Sight and Text in Paris Blues’, in Michael Green, Matthew Holman and Chloe Julius (eds.), Cases of Citation: On Literature in Art (Manchester University Press, Forthcoming)
  • ‘A by-any-means-necessary poetry’: Afro-Surreal Expressionism and the Black Atlantic, in Jonathan Eburne and Anna Watz (eds.), A Cambridge History of Surrealist Poetry (Cambridge University Press, Forthcoming)

Conference papers and presentations 

  • ‘“When the Saints Go Marching In”: Race, Crisis and Rising Tides’, Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference, 2023
  • ‘“The color is the polyrhythm, refracted light!”: Romare Bearden’s Sonorous Canvas’, Sounding Modernism: An Interdisciplinary Conference, King’s College London, 2023
  • ‘“Telescoping Time”: Romare Bearden and Historical Compression’, About Time: Temporality in American Art and Visual Culture, Université de Paris, 2021
  • ‘Hayao Miyazaki’s Granular Entanglements’, Eyes Unclouded: The Films of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, 2019

Teaching

  • 2023-24. UCL, History of Art, PGTA on HART0018: Modern and Contemporary Art in London.
  • 2021-22. UCL, History of Art, PGTA on HART0001: History of Art and Its Objects.
  • 2021-22. Slade School of Fine Art, SPGTA on BFA2: Critical Studies.

Awards

My PhD is fully funded by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP) Open Studentship Award.

 

Kalvin Schmidt-Rimpler Dinh

Email: kalvin.dinh.20@ucl.ac.uk

Qualifications:
MPhil in English Studies (Criticism and Culture), University of Cambridge, 2018-19
BA in Education Studies with English and Drama, University of Cambridge, 2015-18

External roles: I have co-devised two immersive performance projects at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. The first, UBU, took place in August 2018. Performed in the V&A’s underground tunnel entrance, it combined aspects of theatre, dance, performance art and music. It garnered a four-star review from The Guardian, as well as a feature article in iD-Magazine. My collaborators and I were subsequently invited to put on another show at the V&A in 2019, Hamletine, which was reviewed by the London Japan Society. In 2019 I also co-curated an exhibition, Third Space, at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. The multimedia show invited artists and performers from Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds to reflect on the ways in which we sit between worlds, how we might identify as from neither here nor there, or feel caught between heritage and home. The exhibition provided an intervention into the general lack of BAME visibility in Cambridge’s creative scenes.