The concept of ‘cool’ is foundational to contemporary fashion and one of America’s great cultural signifiers. Coolness also, according to the scholar Robert Farris Thompson, arrived in America from related concepts in many cultures across West Africa and the African diaspora. What kinds of decisions do people make to seek out this ever-elusive ideal? What exactly does coolness communicate? Where does the concept even come from? 

In this study we’ll examine how taking an Afro-diasporic view of coolness can help us understand how cool people present themselves, why so many people want to be cool, and how coolness can be understood as “a symbolically generous aesthetic organization of social reality”.

Text:  Robert Farris Thompson’s “An Introduction to Transatlantic Black Art History” 

Date: Saturday, September 26 @ 2pm

Location: Chelsea with Nicholas & Connor