Slavery North invites you to the final talk in our series of eight Fellow Talks in Spring 2026. Visual artist Johnny Floyd shares his research-creation reimagining Moby-Dick by Herman Melville as a narrative framework for examining slavery, whiteness, and the maritime infrastructures in New England.
This hybrid talk is open to students, faculty, staff, and members of the public.
Date/Time: Thursday, May 7, 2026, 10-11AM (EDT)
Location: Room 301, Herter Hall, 161 Presidents Drive, UMass Amherst, Amherst, MA 01003
Online via Zoom:
https://umass-amherst.zoom.us/j/92766927065
Meeting ID: 927 6692 7065
Speaker: Johnny Floyd, Artist-in-Residence Fellow, Spring 2026
Moderator: Dr. Martha McNamara, Associate Professor of Public History & Associate Director Slavery North
Lecture: Leviathan!; or, Charting the White Whale: Reimagining Moby-Dick through Maritime Histories of Northern Slavery
Lecture abstract: Using Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick as a site of narrative reconstruction, Johnny will discuss art-making as a problem-solving mechanism for bridging gaps and resolving omissions in the historical record of the Transatlantic Slave Trade along the northern Atlantic coast
Bio: Johnny Floyd is a self-taught visual artist whose practice examines how histories of slavery and racial ideology are constructed, maintained, and obscured. Grounded in the Black experience in the United States, his work engages archival research, vernacular photography, and material processes such as painting, sewing, and sculptural construction to interrogate the infrastructures, both physical and conceptual, that shaped racial capitalism in the Northeast and beyond. Through repetition, fragmentation, and speculative gesture, Floyd treats the archive not as a fixed record, but as a site of rupture and responsibility. His work proposes art making as a form of historical care, one that confronts inherited narratives while opening space for alternative forms of memory, accountability, and repair. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is held in public and private collections.
