Uri McMillan awarded grant from UC Consortium for Black Studies in California
Congratulations to Professor Uri McMillan who is the recipient of a Faculty Research Grant from the UC Consortium for Black Studies in California. The grant was awarded for his next project, entitled Surfaces, Muses, and Styles: Grace Jones & New York Underground Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s.
Surfaces, Muses, and Styles considers the politics of collaboration between iconic twentieth- century Jamaica-born performer Grace Jones and key interlocutors in the late 1970s to mid- to-late 1980s—including Puerto-Rico-born fashion illustrator and photographer Antonio Lopez, African-American fashion designer Patrick Kelly, and Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake. It seeks to situate Jones and her collaborators within the vibrant cross-pollination between artists, musicians, designers, DJ’s, models, and other tastemakers endemic to the downtown party networks and emerging underground cultures of the late 1970s and early 1980s—an ethos characterized by experimentation, openness, interaction, and freedom.