Author: Camara Dia Holloway

I am the Project Manager for the Romare Bearden Digital Catalogue Raisonné at the Wildenstein Plattner Institute. I earned my PhD at Yale University in the History of Art Department and specialize in twentieth century American art with a particular focus on the history of photography, race and representation, and transatlantic modernist networks. I also serve as a Founding Co-Director of the Association for Critical Race Art History (ACRAH).

CONF: Triumph in My Song: 18th & 19th Century African Atlantic Culture, History, & Performance @ UMaryland

“Triumph in My Song: 18th & 19th Century African Atlantic Culture, History, & Performance” being held at the University of Maryland from May 31-June 2, 2012.  Information about the conference, including the daily schedule, transportation and lodging recommendations, roommate-finding opportunities, and conference registration forms, is available at: http://www.wix.com/hnathans/sea2012conference 

If you have questions about the conference or any trouble with the registration forms, please email us at: seaconference2012@gmail.com.

The conference features a range of national and international scholars and artists.  Our line-up includes a colloquy with 2010 Hubbell Medal winner, Frances Smith Foster, on her recent study, ‘Til Death or Distance Do Us Part: Love and Marriage in African America.  We will also present several performance events, including the award-winning DC-area company, Theatre J in The Whipping Man.  Matthew Lopez’s The Whipping Man is the winner of the 2011 John Gassner Playwriting Award by the NY Outer Critics Circle and has been described by the New York Times  as “Emotionally potent…surreal in the layers of meaning…a quiet force.”

This conference is being supported by the Society of Early Americanists, the American Society for Theatre Research, the School of Theatre Dance, and Performance Studies and the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Maryland, and the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora.

SYMP: POLO S: Reorienting the Visual Culture of the Early Americas

POLO S: Reorienting the Visual Culture of the Early Americas
Friday & Saturday, April 13-14, 2012
The McNeil Center for Early American Studies
University of Pennsylvania
3355 Woodland Walk Philadelphia, PA 19104

Organized by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, History of Art, University of Pennsylvania.

In 1936 and 1943, the Uruguayan artist Joaquin Torres García made two related
drawings both of which depict the continent of South America from a southern
perspective. With the cardinal direction of “Polo S” written across the top of
the continent, the artist implored his modernist contemporaries in the Southern
Cone to reconsider their perspective on the geographic location of the
contemporary avant garde impulse. By invoking Torres García’s radical move,
this international and interdisciplinary conference takes as its mission an
exploration of the theoretical, regional, methodological, and subjective
problems encountered by scholars who are currently working on the “early”
visual and material culture of the southern United States, the Caribbean, and
South America. It is therefore an attempt to identify the shared challenges
that researching and writing about objects produced in these locations prior to
1850 might present in a moment of de-centered intellectual discourse, not unlike
the one that Torres García critiqued in the middle of the last century.

Schedule:

***

Friday, April 13, McNeil Center for Early American Studies

3:30pm – 5:00pm

Keynote:

Marcus Wood, University of Sussex

“Exploding Archives: Slavery in the Americas and the Limits of Recoverability, Some Thoughts Outside the Box”

5:00pm – 7:00pm, Reception, Arthur Ross Gallery, 34th Street, Inside the Fisher
Fine Arts Library.

***

Saturday, April 14, McNeil Center for Early American Studies

9:00am – 9:30am: COFFEE

9:30am – 11:00am: SESSION ONE

Dennis Carr, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

“Asia and the New World: Global Exchange and Artistic Influence in the Colonial Americas”

Mónica Domínguez Torres, University of Delaware
“Visualizing the Americas Upside Down and Inside Out: The Indigenous Subject as Agent”

11:00am – 11:15am: COFFEE

11:15am – 1:00pm: SESSION TWO

Regina Root, College of William & Mary
“Beautiful Fragments:  Women, Space and Presence in Postcolonial Argentina”

Tamara J. Walker, University of Pennsylvania
“Pancho Fierro and the Color of Elegance in Nineteenth-Century Lima, Peru.”

1:00pm – 2:30pm: LUNCH

2:30pm – 4:30pm SESSION THREE

Maurie McInnis, University of Virginia

“The High Price of Virginian Luxuries”
Charmaine Nelson, McGill University
“Sugar Cane, Slaves and Ships: Nineteenth-century Landscape Art as Pro-Slavery Discourse”
Amanda Bagneris, Tulane University
“Ambiguous Bodies and the Reading of Race in the Paintings of Agostino Brunias”

4:30pm – 6:00pm: RECEPTION

*****

The symposium is funded by grants from the University of Pennsylvania’s Mellon
Initiative for Cross-Cultural Contacts and the Terra Foundation for American
Art and is supported by the History of Art Department, Africana Studies, Latin
American and Latino Studies, and the Arthur Ross Gallery.

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/arthistory/events/2012-04-13/polo-s-reorienting-visual-culture-early-americas

Video of the Week: Haitian Master Artists

blackatlanticresource's avatarBlack Atlantic Resource Debate

This week’s videos wing their way to you from Gail Pellett Productions. These short 5 minute and under ‘mini-docs’ accompanied the exhibition ‘Haitian Art’ held at the Brooklyn Museum in 1978. Curated by Ute Stebich this exhibition was a landmark in the U.S. both in terms of its focus – as a major exhibition – on Haitian Art and its use of video within the gallery spaces.

Click the image links below to access five short videos: 1 introductory overview and 4 surviving videos out of 13 which each contain an interview with individual Haitian artists:

Haitian Art

“In 1978  the Brooklyn Museum mounted the first major exhibit of Haitian art in the U.S. — which later traveled to several other cities… Ute Stebich, the curator of this major exhibit, convinced the Brooklyn Museum to send a videographer  to travel around Haiti, shoot interviews with the artists and capture…

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Art Exhibition: Sophia Martelly Inaugurates « L’art haïtien vu par nos femmes »

ICS Lecture and Screening: Patricia Mohammed’s “The Temples of the Other: The South Asian Aesthetic in the Caribbean” and “Coolie Pink and Green”

Watts Towers Q&A with Artist Dominique Moody

lacma's avatarUnframed The LACMA Blog

Last year, LACMA began a partnership with the City of Los Angeles’s Department of Cultural Affairs to work toward the long-term preservation of Watts Towers. Lucas Casso, an intern with LACMA’s Department of Curatorial Planning has been conducting interviews with artists and others who have been involved in or influenced by the Towers.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, I traveled to Watts to interview assemblage artist Dominique Moody. Dominique is currently the R Cloud Artist in Residence and works on East 107th Street, only a stone’s throw from the Watts Towers. Moody’s work was recently featured in a yearlong solo exhibition at the Watts Towers Art Center and can be seen on her website.

Moody and I first walked around the property on which she lives and works, including the installation version of her NOMAD project, the final product of which will give her a traveling studio and living…

View original post 1,152 more words