Ben Luke

speaker

1,919 appearances 8 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 1 Sep

Ben Luke’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.

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A brush with... · A brush with... Dawoud Bey · 18 Aug 2026 podcast

Which of course links to Arthur Jaffer, who was the cinematographer on that film and so on, you know.

I wanted to talk about museums more generally because currently you're at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and you're showing your work alongside objects, African works of art.

And also I know that when you showed Night Coming Tenderly Black in Chicago, you also curated a museum display around it from their collection.

Tell me what these collection displays bring, if you like, to the party.

What do they bring to your own work or displays of your own work?

Maybe we could start with this quite radical display that you're doing now in Toronto.

Which cultural experience changed the way you see the world?

So did you first encounter it by playing the record or did you hear it on a radio or was there a sort of public manifestation of the work that you heard?

There was before a Love Supreme and there was after a Love Supreme, right?

Which writers or poets do you return to?

I'm right in the middle of a deep dive into Tony Morrison at the moment.

And actually, when I was researching for this interview, I'd just finished Beloved and it seemed to me that the project for the works that you've made recently, beginning with Night Coming Tenderly Black and through in this here place and Evergreen and Three Hundred and Fifty Thousand and Stony the Road.

You must have been thinking about Beloved and that extraordinary story.

Yeah.

I hadn't connected the two.

Yeah.

And Stony the Road, of course, is effectively the African American national anthem, which is lift every voice and sing, right?

So that's what you mean about that sort of broad cultural address of the work.

Is there something about the unflinching eye of Morrison that's there too?

One of the things I'm aware of is that there's a sort of unbelievable brutality about her writing, the directness, the direct address, but also unbelievably at the same time, there's an incredible tenderness.

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