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).

CFP: African American Artists in the Midwest @ MACAA 2012

Call for Papers (Deadline April 10, 2012)

African American Artists in the Midwest

Session Chair:  Julia R. Myers Ph.D., Eastern Michigan University

Email:  jmyers@emich.edu

 While American art history tends to be fairly parochial with its emphasis on East Coast artists, African American art history seems to suffer even more strongly from this bias. This session will be devoted to African-American artists or art institutions in the Midwest. The Great Migration from 1913-1949 brought hundreds of thousands of black Americans to Midwest industrial cities like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Minneapolis, and St. Louis. And some of these people and their descendents made art. Indeed on a trip to Detroit in 1964, Langston Hughes said, “Harlem used to be the Negro cultural center of America. If Detroit has not already become so, it is well on its way to becoming it.” Literary historians have frequently taken up the topic of Midwestern African-American writers, but this is far less true in the case of black visual artists. In line with the conference’s content session of Community and Collaboration, papers treating African American mural projects in the Midwest are especially encouraged, as are papers dealing with the educational outreach activities of artists and art institutions. However, all papers dealing with Midwestern African-American art from all time periods, colonial to the present, are welcomed for consideration.

http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/macaa2012/

CFP: Between the Literary and the Visual: Inter-Artistic Approaches to African-American Art History @ MACAA 2012

Call for Papers (Deadline April 10, 2012)
Between the Literary and the Visual: Inter-Artistic Approaches to African-American Art History
Session Chair: Jennifer J. Marshall, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
Email: marsh590@umn.edu

A stubborn truism vexes African-American art history: the canon of black American literature is viewed as more established and robust than that of black American visual arts. This misconception has more to do with conventional disciplinary divisions, than it does with either the quantity or quality of black visual expression. Segregating the “literary” from the “visual”–and assigning these to English and Art History departments, respectively–has obscured the originally inter-artistic nature of much black cultural expression as well as the terms of its early reception and critique.

African-American artists have repeatedly worked in black literary contexts–from Aaron Douglas’s illustrations for Alain Locke’s The New Negro to Glenn Ligon’s painted excerpts from Ralph Ellison and Richard Pryor. At the same time, many (nonblack) literary critics have been enthusiastic interpreters of black visual arts. Theater critic and novelist Carl Van Vechten promoted the painters of the Harlem Renaissance; Sidney Hirsch, one of Vanderbilt University’s influential literary modernists, “discovered” black folk sculptor William Edmondson; and French poststructuralist Roland Barthes famously used a photograph by James Van Der Zee to explain his concept of the photographic punctum.

This panel seeks papers that take stock of this prodigious overlap between the literary and the visual arts. Participants are invited to address how literature and literary criticism may productively inform African-American art history, to recount the specific historical circumstances that compel this approach, and to consider broadly how attention to inter-artistic histories might helpfully reform both approaches to and canons of black cultural expression.

http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/macaa2012/

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

SAVE THE DATE:

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.

Keynote:
Marcus Wood, University of Sussex

Participants:
Amanda Bagneris, Tulane University
Dennis Carr, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Mónica Domínguez Torres, University of Delaware
Maurie McInnis, University of Virginia
Charmaine Nelson, McGill University
Regina Root, College of William & Mary
Tamara J. Walker, University of Pennsylvania

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

CIVIL RIGHTS DISPLAY FOR BROWNSVILLE STUDENT VISITORS

"The Chief"'s avatarWolfsonian-FIU Library

This Friday morning, thirty-four Brownsville Middle School students came to the Wolfsonian with their social studies teacher for tours of our galleries and a library presentation. As the students were studying civil rights, we had laid out a wide variety of materials of the subject in advance of their arrival. When queried about what they knew about the civil rights movement in this country, most of the students quite naturally talked about the struggle in the 1960s and mentioned Dr. Martin Luther King. My own presentation and display of materials was intended to introduce them to the earlier struggles and much longer history of civil rights agitation in America set against the background of the First and Second World Wars.

Although we might have begun earlier, our own discussions of civil rights began with the First World War and the campaign to recruit African Americans as soldiers. Woodrow Wilson’s administration…

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Linsanity’s Yellow Peril

Glenn Nelson's avatarThe Buzz: Glenn Nelson

During the hours before the “chink” references at ESPN, I was convinced that many Asian Americans were willing to overlook Floyd Mayweather, Jason Whitlock, the New York Post’s “Amasian,” and myriad other public indignities in order to experience something so joyous and so spectacularly surprising as Jeremy Lin that even we, the people who are like him, have been conditioned to never have expected it.

Less than a week ago, in trying to explain what Lin means to Asian Americans, I wrote on ESPN.com that his feel-good run in the NBA would be a test of ”an Asian American’s ability to take the bad with the overwhelming good.”

We couldn’t be allowed to have even a fleeting, rapturous moment without the bad-good equation being utterly turned on its head by such a torrent of racially motivated indignation and political-correctness backlash that feels, in some ways, like open season has…

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