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).

REF: Slavery in America Image Gallery

Slavery in America Image Gallery

The American slave trade was an international business. It began in Western Africa, where prisoners were taken for sale to European and American slave traders, and continued in permanent and impromptu slave markets in the United States, ultimately concentrated in the South. Not only were some ten to fifteen million Africans ripped from their lives and families to be imported to the New World–some half a million of them destined for the United States–but the enslaved were also bred for sale on American soil and transported, often under brutal conditions, throughout the slave states. This Image Gallery will continue to grow over the coming months.

http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/scripts/sia/gallery.cgi

CFP: Jewish Art: Reevaluation, Recovery, Reclamation, Respect @ CAA 2012

Call for Papers. CAA 2012/Session sponsored by Northern California Art Historians

Jewish Art: Reevaluation, Recovery, Reclamation, Respect

There is a long and vexed history between Jewish cultural production in the visual realm and the discipline of art history. However, as a field, the study of Jewish art has been coming into its own. Scholars have inquired across a broad range of issues: asking “what is Jewish art?” and “Why has it been excluded from Western (typically Christian) art history?” At the same time, other practitioners have engaged in “excavate and recovery” studies – necessary for the writing of any history of a marginalized group and akin to other ‘newer’ fields, such as Feminist art and African American art. Other important work examines the portrayal of Jews in visual culture and re-evaluates canonical artists for the impact of their heritage on their work. Where are we now? What kinds of questions are we asking? This session invites papers that examine issues—old and new—in field of Jewish art, broadly interpreted. Case studies are also welcome.

Abstracts with a short CV and cover letter may be sent to the session chair: Andrea Pappas (Santa Clara University) at apappas@scu.edu.

Deadline: May 6, 2011.

JOB: Curator of African Art, University of Iowa Museum of Art

Nominations and applications are invited for the full-time salaried position of Curator of Non-Western Art at the University of Iowa Museum of Art (UIMA). The curator will be responsible for the world-renowned Stanley Collection of African Art, and the entire collection of African Art, as well as for the arts of the Ancient and Native Americas, Ancient European Art, and a growing collection of Asian Art, as well as other areas of the collection, as needed.

http://jobs.uiowa.edu/pands/view/59334

BASIC FUNCTION:
The curator possesses deep knowledge of the UIMA collection and shares this
knowledge with students, staff and the public primarily through research,
exhibitions, presentations and publications. The curator acquires new art
for the collection working with the museum director, colleagues, donors and
the art market.

Continue reading “JOB: Curator of African Art, University of Iowa Museum of Art”

EXH: “Ancestors of Congo Square: African Art in the New Orleans Museum of Art” @NOMA

The New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) presents Ancestors of Congo Square: African Art in the New Orleans Museum of Art on May 13 to July 17. In keeping with the spirit of the centennial year, which highlights the museum’s vast and diverse permanent collection, one of the most impressive areas of the museum’s holdings is an extensive African collection. This exhibition highlights the collection as well as the connection between New Orleans and Africa.

For more information, call (504) 658-4100 or visit www.noma.org

On the occasion of the exhibition opening, a 376-page book of the NOMA’s African collection will be available, produced by the New Orleans Museum of Art and published by Scala Publishers of London. Curator and editor William Fagaly, has been the African curator at NOMA for over four decades.

“There are over 225 color illustrations of pieces in the book including a number of field photographs of similar works in their native Africa,” said Fagaly. “This will be one of the first publications to include CT scans and x-rays revealing the contents of African terra cotta sculptures.”

Continue reading “EXH: “Ancestors of Congo Square: African Art in the New Orleans Museum of Art” @NOMA”

PUB: Seeing through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography by Martin Berger

Martin A. Berger, “Seeing through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011)
http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520268647

Seeing through Race is a boldly original reinterpretation of the iconic photographs of the black civil rights struggle. Martin A. Berger’s provocative and groundbreaking study shows how the very pictures credited with arousing white sympathy, and thereby paving the way for civil rights legislation, actually limited the scope of racial reform in the 1960s. Berger analyzes many of these famous images—dogs and fire hoses turned against peaceful black marchers in Birmingham, tear gas and clubs wielded against voting-rights marchers in Selma—and argues that because white sympathy was dependent on photographs of powerless blacks, these unforgettable pictures undermined efforts to enact—or even imagine—reforms that threatened to upend the racial balance of power

Continue reading “PUB: Seeing through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography by Martin Berger”

SYMP: Public Forum “Flashpoints and Fault Lines: Museum Curation and Controversy” April 26-27 @ Smithsonian

http://newsdesk.si.edu/releases/public-forum-flashpoints-and-fault-lines-museum-curation-and-controversy-april-26-27

The public forum outlined below is free and open to the public. Seating will be on a first-come, first-served basis. Media are asked to call the contacts above to cover the sessions. It will be webcast live at si.edu/flashpoints.

 

Continue reading “SYMP: Public Forum “Flashpoints and Fault Lines: Museum Curation and Controversy” April 26-27 @ Smithsonian”

SYMP: Two Centuries of Black American Art Roundtable @ LACMA

Two Centuries of Black American Art
A 35th Anniversary Roundtable

David Driskell, Keynote Speaker

Saturday, May 14, 2011

2 pm

LACMA | Bing Theater
Free, No reservations

Two Centuries of Black American Art, organized for LACMA in 1976 by guest curator David Driskell, powerfully demonstrated the contributions of black artists to American art and art history from 1750 to the mid-twentieth century.

JOIN Professor David Driskell and distinguished panelists Dr. Bridget Cooks, Cecil Fergerson, and Dr. Samella Lewis to honor and consider the significance and impact of this historic exhibition. Franklin Sirmans, Curator, Contemporary Art, will moderate the discussion. Brooke Davis Anderson, Deputy Director, Curatorial Planning, and Austen Bailly, Associate Curator, American Art, will introduce the program.

Sponsored by LACMA’s American Art Council.

EXH: “Romare Bearden: The Artist as Activist” @ The Nathan Cummings Foundation [NYC]

An exhibition organized by the Romare Bearden Foundation

Romare Bearden: The Artist as Activist examines how an American artist agitated for change through the power of his art and writing. This show traces Bearden’s evolution into a true master artist whose work changed our ways of seeing the world and thus our readiness for action in it. On display will be original works as well as examples of his magazine covers and editorial cartoons.

Curated by Diedra Harris-Kelley, C. Daniel Dawson and Robert G. O’Meally

This exhibition is on view from April 28, 2011–July 22, 2011

at the Nathan Cummings Foundation.

The Nathan Cummings Foundation

475 10th Avenue, 14th Floor

New York, NY 10018

 

Opening Reception

Thursday, April 28, 6:00pm–8:00pm

Live music and refreshments

RSVP by April 22 at ncf.events@nathancummings.org

 

Viewing Hours

9:00am-5:00pm, Monday through Friday, by appointment only.

Please contact Arnita Morabito at 212-787-7300, Ext. 206.

SYMP: Nka Roundtable III: “Contemporary African Art and the Museum”

Nka Roundtable III: “Contemporary African Art and the Museum”

Over the next several weeks curators and directors of major museums in the United States, Germany, Japan, South Africa and the UK will engage in spirited but substantial discussion on the relationship between contemporary African art and the museum. I expect excursions into the history of this relationship, its crucial moments, state of affairs, and challenges that remain. In the process, we shall debate issues of presenting this material in art and ethnology museums; the politics of acquisitions and display; museums and scholarship; and the place of contemporary African art–relative to the “traditional” and western contemporary. I suspect that there will be surprising turns in the course of our discussion, but I am certain that the deliberations of this diverse, unprecedented and distinguished panel of curators will surely be of immense value to students and scholars working or interested in this exciting, dynamic field. Please join us!

Convener: *Chika Okeke-Agulu* (Princeton University)

Participants: *Marla Berns* (Director, Fowler Museum of Cultural History, University of California, Los Angeles), *Christa Clarke* (Senior Curator, Newark Museum, Newark, NJ), *Laurie Ann Farrell* (Director of Exhibitions, Savannah College of Art & Design Gallery, Savannah, GA), *Khwezi Gule* (Chief Curator, Hector Pieterson Memorial, Johannesburg), *Kinsey Katchka* (independent scholar/curator), *Yukiya Kawaguchi* (Associate Professor, National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka), *Clive Kellner* (Curator-at-Large, The Gordon Schachat Collection, Johannesburg), *Karen Milbourne* (Curator, Smithsonian National Museum for African Art, Washington DC), *Raison Naidoo* (Director Arts Collections, Iziko: South African National Gallery, Cape Town), *Enid Schildkrout* (Chief Curator/Director of Exhibitions, Museum for African Art, New York) *Chris Spring* (Curator, British Museum, London), *Ulf Vierke* (Director, Iwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth), *Okwui Enwezor*, *Salah M. Hassan*.

http://nkajournal.wordpress.com/

CFP: Session at Southeastern College Art Conference @ Savannah, GA

“African Diaspora Artists in the Americas: New Histories, New Constructions, New Interpretations”

This session will focus on new research addressing art created by African Diaspora artists in the Americas from the colonial eras to the present.  In the last two decades, scholars have both expanded the field of study of African American and African Diasporic art and developed newly nuanced interpretations of the meanings and implications of racialized discourses about artistic production and stylistic interchange.  This sessions seeks papers addressing issues raised by these new discursive constructions related to relationships between artists, social politics, and contemporary visual culture; the significance of trans-Atlantic or trans-Pacific artistic and cultural interchange; the intersections of gender and class with racialized identities; post-colonial approaches to the history and effects of slavery; and challenges to the notion of race itself as an organizing category of knowledge.  Papers that address any aspect of these dimensions of the history of African American or African Diasporic Art in the Americas are welcomed.

Please submit a 200-word (maximum) proposal using the form found on the SECAC website plus a 1 page CV by April 20, 2011 to session Chair: Helen Langa, e-mail: hlanga@american.edu (see address and phone below)

http://www.secollegeart.org/forms/2011_SECAC_Call_for_Papers_PROPOSAL_FORM.doc

For more information about the conference and SECAC, see: http://www.secollegeart.org/annual-conference.html

Helen Langa, PhD
Director, Art History Program
Associate Professor, Art History and Gender Studies
Katzen Art Center 233
Art Department
American University
4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW
Washington D.C. 20016-8004
hlanga@american.edu
202-885-1682