The Grapevine

OBIT: Twins Seven-Seven (1944-2011)

Date: June 16, 2011

Twins Seven-Seven is dead
By Ozolua Uhakheme, Assistant Editor (Arts)

A multidimensional artist, singer, musician, actor, writer and poet, Twins Seven-Seven, one of the greatest artists of the Osogbo School, has died at aged 67. He passed on yesterday at  the University College Hospital, Ibadan, where he had been on admission following a stroke.

The artist, real name Olaniyi Osuntoki was one of the most famous products of Ulli Beier’s experimental art workshops, held in Osogbo in the 1960s.

In recognition of his contribution to the promotion of dialogue and understanding among peoples, particularly in Africa and the African Diaspora, he was named a UNESCO Artist for Peace in 200, in the presence of former president Olusegun Obasanjo who was Chairman of the African Union. The ceremony took place on Africa Day.

The Director-General of CBAAC, Prof. Tunde Babawale described the death of Twin Seven Seven as another tragic news to the art and culture community, barely few days after the passing away of the Managing Director of GT Bank, Mr. Tayo Aderinokun, who was a strong arts enthusiast and collector.  According to Babawale, Twin Seven Seven was revered across the world for his art, and recognized by UNESCO as a torch bearer. “Our hearts go to the family hoping that God will grant him eternal rest. I hope many Twin Seven Sevens will strive  our landscape and I wish Osun State government will immortalize his name,” Babawale said.

Seasoned theatre practitioner and former Deputy Editor The Guardian, Mr. Ben Tomoloju, said the late artist was a pioneering prime mover of the Osogbo Arts commune. He noted that he was so versatile that he influenced a number of Osogbo artists. “His art is spiritual. Though he did not school formally in the arts, but he was a great artist respected across the globe,” Tomoloju added.

Born in 1944, his career began in the early 1960s. He has since become the most famous representative of the renowned Oshogbo school of painting, which is at the heart of Yoruba civilization. His work reflects the cosmology and mythology of the Yoruba culture. He has choose the pseudonym, Twin Seven Seven as a reference to his birth: he is the sole survivor of a line of seven sets of twins.

His work has been shown in numerous exhibitions throughout the world, notably at France’s National Museum of Modern Art – Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Houston Contemporary Arts Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. and the National Modern Art Gallery in Lagos.

His encounter with the graphic arts and painting came about in 1964 when he met a group of artists known as the Mbare Mbayo Group. This is where the Oshobgo School had it’s origins. Twins Seven-Seven began by drawing on paper. Drawing and engraving have remained a constant and central reference in his work. The originality of his line comes from the fact that it appears to unfold blindly, with no plan, through a progressive invasion of the entire surface. This technique gives his paintings their extraordinary detail.

With the exception of a few paintings which represent “profane” themes, the universe of Twins Seven-Seven is thoroughly rooted in the Yoruba imagery, both religious and folkloric.

This report will be published in The Nation newspaper website tomorrow, Friday June 16.

Ozolua Uhakheme, Assistant Editor (Arts) <ozoluauhakheme@yahoo.com>

PUB: Representations 113 – New World Slavery and the Matter of the Visual

Representations 113
A Special Issue on New World Slavery
Representations 113 from University of California Press—A Special Issue: New World Slavery and the Matter of the Visual, edited by Huey Copeland, Krista Thompson, and Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby.This special issue features essays on the ongoing effects of racial bondage as seen through art and the visual archive—Including 16 color reproductions.

Representations 113: New World Slavery and the Matter of the Visual makes an eloquent case for the critical importance of visual representation to the rewriting of slavery’s imaginary.
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In New World Slavery and the Matter of the Visual:
Perpetual Returns: New World Slavery and the Matter of the Visual
Huey Copeland, Krista Thompson
Read this articleNegative-Positive Truths
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby

The Evidence of Things Not Photographed: Slavery and Historical Memory in the British West Indies
Krista Thompson

Artists’ Portfolios (16 full-color reproductions)
Hank Willis Thomas, Fred Wilson, Christopher Cozier

Glenn Ligon and Other Runaway Subjects
Huey Copeland

The Museu do Negro in Rio and the Cult of Anastácia as a New Model for the Memory of Slavery
Marcus Wood

Neither Lost nor Found: Slavery and the Visual Archive
Stephen Best

“What emerges, ultimately, is the definitively unfinished nature of freedom and the expansiveness of the peculiar institution’s deep structure: aspects of its legacy are always differently coming into view, underlining how our approach to its memory in the visual field must necessarily be shifting and recursive, ever alert to both the promises and perils of slavery’s perpetual returns.”
—Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson, from Perpetual Returns: New World Slavery and the Matter of the VisualVisit Representations online.
Copyright © 2011 University of California Press. All Rights Reserved.
2000 Center Street, Suite 303 | Berkeley | CA 94704
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REF: Transatlantic Project Retrieves Rare Livingstone Manuscripts

Transatlantic Project Retrieves Rare Livingstone Manuscripts

For 140 years, rare manuscripts crucial to our understanding of the last years of the celebrated Victorian explorer and abolitionist David Livingstone in Africa were inaccessible due to their fragility and near-indecipherable script. Now a pioneering transatlantic collaboration among scholars from Birkbeck College (University of London), U.S. imaging scientists, and British and American cultural institutions has begun to make these manuscripts available online, starting with the publication of the revised edition of Livingstone’s Letter from Bambarre (http://livingstone.library.ucla.edu/) by Livingstone Online and the UCLA Digital Library Program.

The transatlantic collaboration is among the first to apply multispectral imaging–a preservation technology previously used to recover erased writing in medieval palimpsests–to restore the text of a nineteenth-century British manuscript. The revised critical edition (2011, orig. 2010) of Livingstone’s 1871 letter to his close friend and future editor Horace Waller includes a full transcription of the text, detailed critical notes, an extensive bibliography, an overview of spectral imaging, and a selection of spectral images processed to enhance both text and topographical features.

Continue reading “REF: Transatlantic Project Retrieves Rare Livingstone Manuscripts”

CFP: 49th Parallel

To coincide with the publication of its latest issue, the American and Canadian Studies journal 49th Parallel is issuing a call for papers.

http://www.49thparallel.bham.ac.uk/

49th Parallel is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary e-journal devoted to American and Canadian Studies. Since 1999, it has sought to transcend traditional boundaries and promote innovative and challenging academic work.

49th Parallel is also excited to be establishing links with the cutting-edge blog site EA Worldview<http://www.enduringamerica.com/>, which will shortly be providing a platform for the discussion of selected articles.

The editors wish to encourage 5,000-7,000 word submissions that cover the broad range of subjects that typically fall within American Studies as well as articles of a more interdisciplinary nature.

Possible subject areas include: literature; history; cultural studies; politics; film; foreign relations; photography.

This multidisciplinary approach aims to promote a broad spectrum of academic debate, and to utilise the multimedia capabilities offered to an e-based journal. In this sense 49th Parallel also hopes to encourage traditional academic essays alongside the use of video and photo academic texts.

49th Parallel – which gets its name from the U.S.-Canadian border – is predominately a North American Studies Journal. However, we also want to encourage articles that engage with wider notions of America, so welcome submissions concerning Latin and Central America.

We are also happy to receive submissions from postgraduates and early career scholars alongside established academics.

To ensure the highest academic quality, all articles are fully peer reviewed.  For full submission guidelines please visit our website http://www.49thparallel.bham.ac.uk

If you have any other queries or wish to submit an article please email the editors 49thParallel@bham.ac.uk.

A list of books available for review can also be found on our website
http://www.49thparallel.bham.ac.uk/submissions.htm#books

For regular updates you can now follow us on Facebook

<http://www.facebook.com/pages/49th-Parallel-Journal/156640984351326>

and

Twitter

<http://www.twitter.com/49th__Parallel>

LEC: Conversations: Among Friends (South African Artists) @ MoMA

EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT: CONVERSATIONS: AMONG FRIENDS

A public series presented by the Friends of Education of The Museum of Modern Art, Conversations: Among Friends explores works of art as reflections of their political and social contexts. Please feel free to share this invitation with friends, family, and colleagues. Tickets ($35) may be purchased at the Museum information desk, film desk, online, or through the Friends of Education office.

Conversations: Among Friends
FEATURING ARTISTS SENZENI MARASELA, VUYILE VOYIYA, AND SUE WILLIAMSON
WITH RIASON NAIDOO, DIRECTOR, SOUTH AFRICAN NATIONAL GALLERY

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

7:00 pm program | 8:15 pm reception

Doors open at 6:45 pm

The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2

The Museum of Modern Art

11 West 53 Street, New York City

 

 TICKETS ($35) MAY BE PURCHASED IN PERSON AT THE MUSEUM, ONLINE AT MOMA.ORG,

OR BY CALLING THE FRIENDS OF EDUCATION OFFICE  AT (212) 408-8517.

All tickets will be held at the door.

Please use The Ronald S. and Jo Carole Lauder Building entrance,
east of the Museum’s main entrance on Fifty-third Street.

This evening’s program presents a conversation between artists Senzeni Marasela, Vuyile Voyiya, and Sue Williamson, moderated by Riason Naidoo, Director, South African National Gallery, and featuring an introduction by Judy Hecker, Assistant Curator, Department of Prints and Illustrated Books, and organizer of Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now. Following the program, guests are invited to continue the conversation and meet the participants at an intimate reception in The Agnes Gund Garden Lobby.

Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now, on view through August 14 in The Paul J. Sachs Prints and Illustrated Books Galleries, presents nearly 80 prints, posters, books, and wall stencils created over the last five decades that demonstrate the exceptional reach, range, and impact of printed art in South Africa during and after a period of enormous upheaval. Drawn entirely from the Museum’s collection, this exhibition includes recent projects by Senzeni Marasela and Vuyile Voyiya, as well as a seminal work from the 1990s by Sue Williamson. Read more at MoMA.org/southafrica.

Continue reading “LEC: Conversations: Among Friends (South African Artists) @ MoMA”

PUB: Paths of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Interactions, Identities, and Images By Ana Lucia Araujo

Of particular interest to art historians:

Part IV: Paths of Representations

Chapter 10: Hidden Beneath the Surface: Atlantic Slavery in Winslow
Homer’s “Gulf Stream”
Peter H. Wood

Chapter 11: Slaves’ Supplicant & Slaves’ Triumphant: The Middle Passage of
an Abolitionist Icon
Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie

Chapter 12: Picturing Homes and Border Crossings: The Slavery Trope in
Films of the Black Atlantic
Awam Amkpa and Gunja SenGupta

http://www.cambriapress.com/cambriapress.cfm?template=15&bid=444

Description

Based on innovative and extensive research, this edited volume examines the complex and unique human, cultural, and religious exchanges that resulted from the enslavement and the trade of Africans in the North and the South Atlantic regions during the era of the transatlantic slave trade. The book shows the connections between multiple Atlantic worlds that contain unique and diverse characteristics. The Atlantic slave trade disrupted African societies, families, and kin groups. Along the paths of the slave trade, men, women and children were imprisoned, separated, raped, and killed by war, famine and disease. The authors investigate some of the different pathways, whether physical and geographical or intellectual and metaphorical, that arose over the centuries in different parts of the Atlantic world in response to the slave trade and slavery. Highlighting unique and similar aspects, this groundbreaking book follows the trajectories of individuals, groups, and images, rethinking their relations with the local, and the Atlantic contexts.

Continue reading “PUB: Paths of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Interactions, Identities, and Images By Ana Lucia Araujo”

CFP: Native American Art Studies Association [NAASA ]

NAASA [Native American Art Studies Association]
17th Biennial Meeting
Ottawa, Ontario – October 26-29, 2011

Young Scholars Workshop
Organizer: Kristine Ronan, University of Michigan

This workshop is for Ph.D. students, at any stage of their process, who are pursuing Native American art as a primary field of inquiry. Our goal is to foster a dialogue about the state of the field and its related issues. Participants will be asked to read several articles and book excerpts in advance of the session, in order to discuss issues around several questions: What do we, as future scholars-in-training, think about the state of the field, and where do we see ourselves fitting? How do we approach the narration of Native American art history and individual artists within that history? What role does our own personal situatedness need to play (or not play) in relation to our work and the scholarly enterprise?

Submit 50-word statement of interest to participate in the Young Scholars Workshop by June 15, 2011 directly to: Kristine Ronan, at kkronan@umich.edu

For more information on NAASA and the conference, see www.nativearts.org

PUB: Selma Burke and Edmonia Lewis featured in SAAM Research and Scholars Center Newsletter

The Spring 2011 issue of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Research and Scholars Center Newsletter is now online:

http://americanart.si.edu/research/newsletters/

This “special” issue features three women artists: Theresa Bernstein, Selma Burke, and Edmonia Lewis. Included is a selected bibliography of publications highlighting African American women artists. Key archival information about Burke is included, plus the discovery of a photograph of a lost work by Lewis.

PUB: Speak Now by Nana Oforiatta Ayim

A long-overdue shift is happening in how contemporary African art – from Dakar and Lagos to Cape Town, Harare and Rabat – is disseminated and discussed.

This piece was published in the May issue of frieze Magazine and can be found online at:
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/speak-now/

Speak Now

Much of what we know of art – how it is taught, exhibited and presented, whether in London or Lagos or Lahore – was first defined by Western critics. When Pablo Picasso drew inspiration from Bambara and Gabon masks after a visit to the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris in 1906, it was the West that decided that his works were ‘Modernist’ and that the masks were ‘primitive’. In 1953, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais made their first film, Les statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die), which dealt with African art. In 2005, I was asked to do a new translation of the film from French into English as Marker was unhappy with the one that existed. In the film the directors talk of the ‘botany of death’ that happened when sculptures were taken from their natural settings in Africa to the museum cabinets of the West. The study of African art is not just a study of lines and forms, but also of the histories of silence.

Continue reading “PUB: Speak Now by Nana Oforiatta Ayim”

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