The 2022 Ruth First Annual Memorial Lecture featured guest speaker, South African artist Peter Sacks in conversation with Chad Williams, Samuel J. and Augusta Spector Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Brandeis University.

Born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, in 1950, Sacks grew up in the City of Durban on the Indian Ocean. As a student at the University of Natal, Sacks became involved in the struggle against the apartheid regime as a member of the National Union of South African Students and executive of the Students Representative Council. His exhibition, Peter Sacks: Resistance, which is now on view at the Rose Art Museum, pays tribute to numerous resistors from across the globe, including the anti-apartheid activists of his youth. Intricately layered and textural mixed-media symbolic and figurative portraits of Bantu Stephen Biko, Bessie Head, Nelson Mandela, and Richard Turner—among others included in the show—convey a sense of their life, historical background, struggles, acts of resistance, imprisonment, or exile, and, sometimes, their death.

In conversation with Williams, Sacks discussed the impetus behind his Resistance series and the importance of awareness and action in an ever-fracturing world. A Q&A and light reception will follow the conversation.