Critical Encounters: A Graduate Student Symposium in Honor of Sidney Littlefield Kasfir
Friday & Saturday
April 22 & 23, 2011
Michael C. Carlos Museum
Emory University
Reception Hall
Throughout her career Dr. Sidney L. Kasfir has sought to rethink the way scholars, artists, museums, and viewers understand and categorize African art. She has attempted to expand our classificatory system without allowing generalizations to dilute the complex efforts of artists, cultures, and visual languages. This symposium, organized in honor of her retirement from Emory University, considers three themes to which Dr. Kasfir has contributed: Commodification and Tourism; Heritage; and The Artist, The Workshop, and Cultural Brokerage.
Invited graduate students from across the country, in multiple disciplines working with visual culture in Africa, will explore topics related to these themes in a day-long symposium that is open to the Emory community and the public.
This program is co-sponsored by Emory University’s Michael C. Carlos Museum, Art History Department, and Institute for African Studies.
Friday, April 22
7:30 pm
Keynote Address
Dr. Chika Okeke-Agulu, Assistant Professor of Art History, Princeton University, New Thoughts on the Mbari Mbayo Workshops in Osogbo, 1962-66
Saturday, April 23
9:30 am
Coffee & pastries
10:00 am
Introduction
10:10-11:30 am
Panel One
Global/Local Heritages
John A. Tyson, Emory University, Imaging Heritage: Identity, Memory, and UNESCO in Cidade Velha
Michelle Apotsos, Stanford University, Global Heritage and the Reconceptualization of the Djenne Mosque
Amanda Hellman, Emory University, The Tangibility of Nostalgia: Zanzibar Stone Town as a site of Intangible Heritage.
W. Michael Hamm, UCLA, Return to Goree: Examining the Experience of Cultural Tourism in Dakar, Senegal
Discussant: Peri Klemm, Associate Professor of Art History, California State University, Northridge
Chair, African Arts Council, San Diego Museum of Art
11:40 am-1:00 pm
Panel Two
Cultural Brokerage: The Workshop and the Market
Paul Davis, Indiana University, Control the Colony! The Maison des Artisans Soudanais and Artist Education, 1920s-1940s
Jessica Gerschultz, Emory University, Maquettes Imagined by the Meter: Safia Farhat’s Rades Workshop
Margaretta Swigert-Gacheru, Loyola University, The Kenyan Artists, the Workshop/Network, and Cultural Brokerage
Margaret Nagawa, Makerere University, Beyond the Gallery: Interactions Between Audiences, Artists and their Art through the Kampala Art Tour 2007 – 2010
Discussant: Sunanda Sunyal, Associate Professor of Art History and Critical Studies, The Art Institute of Boston[X]
1:00-2:30 pm
Lunch Break
2:30-4:00 pm
Panel Three
Cultural Brokerage: The Artist and Art History
MacKenzie Moon Ryan, University of Florida, Global Networks of Trade and the Historical Emergence of Kanga, a Swahili Textile
Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi, Emory University, The Contemporary Present and its Modernist Past: Mapping a Transition in African Art History
Rachel Nelson, University of California Santa Cruz, Remapping the Narrative in Contemporary African Art
Annie Goodner, Emory University, Seeing the Other Side of White in David Goldblatt’s Some Afrikaners Photographed 1975
Discussant: Delinda Collier, Assistant Professor, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism
4:15 p.m.
Film Screening
Lamidi Olonade Fakeye: The Life of a Master Carver, Written and directed by Elizabeth Morton, Assistant Professor of Art History, Wabash College
ACRAH 