Founders Day Event 2024: Nell Irvin Painter In Conversation with Lisa Unger Baskin

In honor of our 2024 Founders Day, The David Ruggles Center welcomes acclaimed historian and writer, Nell Irvin Painter, Professor Emerita of American History at Princeton University, in conversation with Lisa Unger Baskin, eminent women’s historian and collector and DRC Board Member. Topics will range from issues of race in America, to Sojourner Truth, to making art in later life. Painter will also sign copies of her new collection of essays entitled, I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays.

Among her many accomplishments, Nell Irvin Painter is the preeminent scholar of Sojourner Truth, the antislavery, women’s rights, and freedmen’s advocate who lived in Florence MA for 14 years where she bought her first home, published her autobiography, and launched her career as a nationally known lecturer and activist. Painter’s forthcoming work, Sojourner Truth Was a New Yorker, and She Didn’t Say That, follows her earlier groundbreaking biography, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol. We are grateful to Bombyx Center for Arts & Equity for hosting the event, located across the street from the statue of Sojourner Truth, and a few doors down from Truth’s house in Florence.

After the talk, all are welcome for a speakers’ reception with refreshments at the David Ruggles Center for History and Education at 225 Nonotuck St. Florence, just down the hill from Bombyx.

About I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays

“From the New York Times bestselling author of History of White People and Old in Art School, a finalist for the NBCC Award, comes a comprehensive new collection of essay spanning art, politics, and the legacy of racism that shapes American history as we know it.

Throughout her prolific writing career, Nell Painter has published works on such luminaries as Sojourner Truth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Malcolm X. Her unique vantage on American history pushes the boundaries of personal narrative and academic authorship. Led by an unbridled curiosity for her subjects, Painter asks readers to reconsider ideas of race, politics, and identity. I Just Keep Talking assembles her writing for the first time into a single volume, displaying the breadth and depth of Painter’s decades-long historical inquiry and the evolution of Black political thought—and includes a dazzling introduction and coda being published for the first time in this collection. From her mining of figures like Carrie Buck and Martin Delaney for their resonance today, to a deep dive into the history of exclusion through the work of Toni Morrison, to a discussion of the American political landscape after the 2016 election, Painter nimbly portrays the trials of a country frequently at war with itself.

Along with Painter’s writing, this collection offers her original artwork, threaded throughout the book as counterpoint and emphasis. Her visual art shows a deft mind turning toward the tragedy and humor of her subjects; pulling from newspapers, personal records, and original sketches, Painter’s artwork testifies to the dialectic of tremendous change and stasis that continues to shape American history.

These essays resist easy answers in favor of complexity, the inescapable sense of our country’s potential thwarted by its failures. This collection will surely solidify Painter’s place among the finest critics and writers of the last half century.”

About Nell Irvin Painter

Nell Irvin Painter, Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, Princeton University, is the author of scholarly books of history including the New York Times bestseller The History of White People; Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol an awardee of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association; and the National Critics Circle finalist Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2007, she has received honorary degrees from institutions such as Yale, Wesleyan, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Dartmouth and has served as president of the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association. After a Ph.D. in history from Harvard, she earned degrees in painting from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers and the Rhode Island School of Design. Nell Painter lives and works in East Orange, New Jersey, and the Adirondacks. When not writing essays and drawing self-portraits, she makes artist’s books that visualize people and history, often in residencies such as MacDowell, Yaddo, Ucross, and Bogliasco. She currently serves as Madame Chairman of MacDowell. In early 2024 Doubleday will publish a collection of her essays entitled I Just Keep Talking. She is working on a new book on Sojourner Truth, entitled Sojourner Truth Was a New Yorker, and She Didn’t Say That.