Adam Tinkle
Visiting Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Documentary Studies
Skidmore College
Late in 2016, in an informal chat with Dayton Director Ian Berry, I described a new course I was designing for the following semester, “Black Studies, Sound, and Technology.” Noting the centrality, in my conception of these three intersecting topics, of Sun Ra (1914–1993), the legendary composer, bandleader, keyboardist, poet, and philosopher widely credited for inaugurating Afrofuturism, I expressed an interest in connecting the course to the museum, as I have done, in smaller or larger ways, with most of my courses at Skidmore. Little could I imagine that, in scarcely a month, I would be in Chicago with Ian and his longtime art-world friend John Corbett, a central figure in writing about and preserving Ra’s legacy and archive, sitting at a table piled with material from that archive, which Corbett and his wife, Terri Kapsalis, ultimately gifted to the museum.