Temporal Estrangement: A Path to No Place A Conversation between Phillip A. Townsend, Ph.D. and Christopher Paul

Dr. Phillip A. Townsend, Ph.D., and Christopher Paul will be in conversation about the works in the exhibition, Temporal Estrangement: A Path to No Place, exploring Queer and Black Speculative Theory in relation to world-making and transcendence. The discussion will be followed by music from DJ MLE.

This event is funded in part by the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance.

Christopher Paul (b. Bulverde, TX, 1996) is a Houston-based artist whose work investigates speculative states of transcendence, informed by their mixed Gullah Geechee/Korean heritage and Queer identity. Drawing from Jayna Brown’s Black speculative thought and spiritual lineages including Hoodoo and Buddhism, Paul’s practice questions the “Human” as a fixed category, instead imagining subjectivities that exist beyond space, time, and corporeality.

Dr. Phillip A. Townsend is the Curator of Art at the Art Galleries at Black Studies (AGBS) at The University of Texas at Austin. A graduate of UT’s doctoral program in Art History, he specializes in modern and contemporary art, with a focus on BIPOC artists and identity politics. Before joining AGBS, he co-founded the Austin-based Neon Queen Collective. Townsend has curated retrospectives on artists such as Melvin Edwards, Alicia Henry, and Nicole Awai, as well as multi-institutional exhibitions on María Magdalena Campos-Pons and Charles White. His recent exhibition, Transcendence: A Century of Black Queer Ecstasy, 1924–2024, examines Black queer ecstasy over the past 100 years, addressing its absence in historical records and honoring the resilience, beauty, and transformative power of the Black queer community.