Cartoonist Keith Knight speaks about social justice
Watch the lecture recording
Watch Keith’s UO Today interview
Many of us remember the excitement of getting the Sunday paper and immediately opening it to the funnies pages where we found colorful characters and their stories. Perhaps we no longer take those stories seriously because we think of them as kids’ stuff. But comics and cartoons matter because stories matter. Comics are a way to tell stories. Story telling is how humans make meaning. How we are portrayed in the stories of our culture matters because those stories influence the narratives in our heads. They affect the aspirations we allow ourselves to have. They affect what risks we are willing to take. Stories also influence how others see us. They affect how the people around us receive our words, our ideas, and our humanity.
Cartoonist Keith Knight is one of the most highly regarded cartoonists in the United States. He is part of a generation of African American artists who were raised on hip-hop, infusing their work with urgency, edge, humor, satire, politics, and
themes of racial justice and equality. On Tuesday, February 7, 2023, Keith Knight will give a slideshow lecture titled “The Intersection of Art and Social Justice” at 5:30 p.m. in the EMU Redwood Auditorium as the Oregon Humanities Center’s 2022–23 Colin Ruagh Thomas O’Fallon Memorial Lecturer in Art and American Culture. Knight will take a deep dive on twenty artists who inspired him to use his art to address social issues—artists like Ollie Harrington, Langston Hughes, Octavia Butler, Oscar Michaux, James Baldwin, alongside current artists like Dread Scott, Public Enemy, and Fly.
Knight has been creating comics and cartoons since grade school, and has been drawing his social and personal commentaries since the 1990’s. “My first Black teacher was my American Lit teacher in college. He assigned us James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison to read. When someone asked why he was giving us all Black writers, he answered, ‘I’m giving you all American writers.’ That revelation changed me. Because he was making the point that what we know as American Literature, i.e. Mark Twain, is limited at best. And I loved that he was working within the system, to subvert the system. My comics went from being about keg parties, to being about growing up a Black man in America.”
Knight is the author of the comic strips The K Chronicles, (Th)ink, and The Knight Life. His art has appeared in various publications including the New Yorker, the Washington Post, Daily KOS, San Francisco Chronicle, Medium.com, Ebony, ESPN the Magazine, L.A. Weekly, MAD Magazine, and the Funny Times. And he is a co-creator and co-writer of Hulu’s streaming series Woke based on The K Chronicles and his life, now in its second season.
The O’Fallon Lecture was established by a gift from Henry and Betsy Mayer, named in memory of their nephew, son of the late UO law professor James O’Fallon and his wife, artist Ellen Thomas. The subject of this lecture alternates between law and art in American culture. Knight’s slideshow lecture is the second event in the OHC’s 2022–23 Belonging series. The talk is free and open to the public. It will be livestreamed and ASL interpreted. Register.