The Grapevine

EXH: “Fateful Journey: Africa in the Works of El Anatsui” @ Museum of Modern Art, Hayama [Japan]

C_HAYAMAelanatsui.png
“Gli (Wall)”. (Collection of the artist)
MUSEUM OF MODERN ART HAYAMA
Fateful Journey: Africa in the Works of El Anatsui
The first solo exhibition in Japan of the contemporary African sculptor El Anatsui (born 1944 in Ghana; lives in Nigeria). With the help of his assistants, El Anatsui crushes, crumples, folds and ties together liquor bottle caps into colorful wall hangings or self-standing sculptures. Recycling discarded junk, El Anatsui creates ‘‘metal textiles’’ that now hang in major museums. About 30 works are in the display.

OPP: MESDA SUMMER INSTITUTE to focus on Charleston

MESDA SUMMER INSTITUTE EARLY SOUTHERN MATERIAL CULTURE & DECORATIVE ARTS

THE CAROLINA LOWCOUNTRY: Charleston, Atlantic Port City

July 5 – 29, 2011

The Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts is accepting applications from graduate students, decorative arts professionals, and independent scholars for the 35th MESDA Summer Institute.  The 2011 Summer Institute explores the material culture of the Carolina Low Country, with a focus on Charleston as an Atlantic port city.

Dr. Louis Nelson, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Architectural History, University of Virginia, is the 2011 UVA Resident Scholar. Professor Nelson teaches courses in American architecture specializing in colonial and early national architecture, vernacular architecture, and theories and methods of sacred space. The Beauty of Holiness, his most recent book, examines the ways Anglican churches in colonial South Carolina, the nexus of many social landscapes, express regional identity, social politics, and divergent theologies of the sacred.

In addition to Dr. Nelson, guest lecturers include leading scholars in American material culture and Chesapeake history.  The program’s month-long curriculum includes lectures, discussions, workshops, artifact studies, research projects, and a six-day study trip to Charleston, South Carolina.

The MESDA Summer Institute is a partnership between the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts and the University of Virginia’s Graduate Program in the History of Art and Architecture.   Students receive three hours of graduate credit through the University of Virginia.

COSTS AND HOUSING: Tuition for the 2011 Summer Institute is $2,000.00*.  Financial aid is available to qualified graduate students and museum professionals.  Students are responsible for housing and some meal expenses. Dormitory accommodation is available on the campus of Salem College, near the Institute center at MESDA. Double occupancy rooms are $465.00* for the four weeks. (Single supplement: $150.00). The cost for accommodations on the six-day study trip will be approximately $445 (double occupancy)*

*All costs are subject to change.

Applications are due April 20, 2011.

For more information – and an application – visit the 2011 Summer Institute website http://www.MESDA.org/SI

Or contact Sally Gant at SGant@oldsalem.org / 336-721-7361

LEC: Imaging Black Europe @ Goethe-Institut, March 24, 2011

A Conversation between Tina Campt and Hazel V. Carby

Mar 24, 2011 7:00 PM
Goethe-Institut Wyoming Building / 5 East Third Street

Join us for a lecture and lively conversation with professors Tina Campt and Hazel V. Carby as they present and discuss their work on twentieth-century black European history; forms of political organization and social exclusion; and contemporary visual culture in a global context.

http://www.studiomuseum.org/event-calendar/event/imaging-black-europe-2011-03-24

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SYMP: The Body in History / The Body in Space @ Harvard, March 24-26, 2011

Home – Cambridge Talks V: The Body in History / The Body in Space.

The history of the body has been a locus of prolific research in the past several decades, engaging scholars from disciplines as diverse as history of medicine, cultural history, literature, sociology, and anthropology. The body’s experience of health and sickness, histories of the senses, changing standards of civility, the body as political instrument – these and other approaches have recovered the centrality of the human subject in studies of the past and present. Yet current scholarship on the body often relegates issues of space to the background, treating it as a neutral setting against which bodies interact. Conversely, treatments of the body and its history are scant in disciplines focused on space and the built environment. In fields like architectural history, geography, and urban studies, the presence of the body is taken for granted and its history rarely emerges as a critical contribution to the history of space.

This conference aims to question such a facile body-space relationship by positing that the history of the body must also be a history of the body in space, and that the history of spatial practices must involve a history of the body. By bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines, we hope to interrogate the material specificity of architecture and the body through a range of questions linking the two:

  • What role does the built environment play in our understandings of the body?
  • How have past regulatory practices of the body influenced the design of spaces?
  • How can we reclaim human agency while acknowledging the limits imposed on the body by spatial constructs?

This conference will feature an eclectic mix of performance art, video presentations, and academic papers. Participants include: Linda Nash, David Serlin, Annmarie Adams, Christina Cogdell, Janet Beizer, Priya Srinivasan, Andrew Herscher, Nell Breyer, Carey Foster, and others. Please visit www.cambridgetalks.org for a full schedule of events.

“The Body in History / The Body in Space” is generously supported by Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Provost Fund for Student Collaboration, the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Harvard Graduate Student Council, the Program in the History of American Civilization, the Department of the History of Science, and the Department of Anthropology.

LEC: Richard Powell 2009 Wyeth Lecture in American Art Podcast

Link to video: http://www.artbabble.org/video/ngadc/wyeth-lecture-american-art-minstrelsy-uncorked

PODCAST: WYETH LECTURE IN AMERICAN ART

Minstrelsy “Uncorked”: Thomas Eakins’ Empathetic Realism
Richard J. Powell

Recorded on November 4, 2009, this podcast presents the fourth Wyeth Lecture in American Art, a biennial event hosted by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and supported by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art. Richard J. Powell focuses on Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) as uniquely empathetic among the many 19th-century artists who depicted African American performance and entertainment. Eakins’s Negro Boy Dancing (1887; Metropolitan Museum of Art) shows a young banjo player, an elderly teacher, and an adolescent dancer, evoking the American rage for the form of musical theater known as minstrelsy. Eakins’s watercolor, along with two oil-on-canvas studies at the National Gallery of Art, challenged the tendency of minstrelsy to employ racial ridicule and physical exaggeration. Instead, Powell argues, Eakins adhered to a painterly realism as well as his own brand of empathy and ethics.

 

Thomas Eakins, Study for “Negro Boy Dancing”: The Boy, probably 1877, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington

Continue reading “LEC: Richard Powell 2009 Wyeth Lecture in American Art Podcast”

EXH: Senghor Reid @ Art X Detroit

Art X Detroit is pleased to present a short video by Emmy award-winning filmmaker, Stephen McGee, featuring Kresge Visual Arts Fellow, Senghor Reid. This is the fourth video in a series featuring the 2008-2010 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellowship Awardees and Eminent Artists. Join us as we feature a new video each day, leading up to the opening night of Art X Detroit on April 6, 2011.

REF: The Black Atlantic Resource

The Black Atlantic Resource:
http://www.liv.ac.uk/csis/blackatlantic
http://blackatlanticresource.wordpress.com/
Follow us on Twitter: @blackatlantic1

This exciting new resource is a collaborative project between the University of Liverpool and Tate Liverpool originally constructed on the occasion of Tate Liverpool’s exhibition “Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic“. This resource seeks to promote the study of black Atlantic cultures by providing a hub for access to current research, debates and online materials and a space for scholarly exchange.

The Black Atlantic Resource provides free access to current research, artworks, chronological and bibliographic information in this area. We are happy to publish posts about new publications in relevant fields of study, as well as book reviews, and information about other online resources.

If you would like to contribute your research or take advantage of this opportunity to publicise please contact Wendy Asquith: w.j.asquith@liv.ac.uk<mailto:w.j.asquith@liv.ac.uk>

We also provide information on key historical and current figures working within the flows of the Black Atlantic.

Check out our recent profiles on Marcus Garvey:
http://www.liv.ac.uk/csis/blackatlantic/information/people%20D-J/Marcus_Garvey.htm

and Renee Cox:
http://blackatlanticresource.wordpress.com/2010/08/14/renee-cox-if-you-dont-ask-you-dont-get-then-you-get-kicked-to-the-curb/

There are a number of platforms through which to access the Black Atlantic Resource. Our main site which is updated with new content regularly: http://www.liv.ac.uk/csis/blackatlantic

Alternatively you can subscribe to our blog and receive updates each time we post up new material here: http://blackatlanticresource.wordpress.com/

Or you can follow us on Twitter, where we’ll keep you updated with new online research, resources and debates as well as updates on our own new material. Find us: @blackatlantic1.

LEC/SYMP: “Of Slavery and Abolitions: Perspectives from the World of the Slaves” Keynote by Franklin Knight

Keynote Address by:

Franklin W. Knight, Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

Keynote address for:

Abolishing Slavery in the Atlantic World: the
‘Underground Railroad’  in the Americas, Africa, and Europe

Organized by Underground Railroad History Project of the Capital Region, Inc.

Saturday, April 9, 2011 at 9am
Bush Memorial, Russell Sage College, Troy, New York

Information at: www.ugrworkshop.com

The story of slavery and abolition is most often told within national and
regional frames, and focuses mostly on the anti-slavery outlooks and
actions of elite figures who were not themselves enslaved. Professor
Knight, a specialist in the slave societies of the Americas and beyond, is
very familiar with the very different perspectives of the enslaved to
these questions. In his talk, he will discuss the lives, outlooks, and
actions of enslaved people as they survived, resisted, and fought to
overthrow the detested system that held them in bondage.

Conference registration online is ready. Register early!

Join the 10th anniversary conference celebrating and preserving Underground Railroad history in its national and international context
and its relationship with us today.

It’s the place to be on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, April 8, 9, and 10

Registration available at www.ugrworkshop.com or by calling 518-432-4432

Continue reading “LEC/SYMP: “Of Slavery and Abolitions: Perspectives from the World of the Slaves” Keynote by Franklin Knight”

LEC: Who Owns Art? a conversation @ Pool Art Fair New York 2011

A conversation about co-option and ownership in contemporary creative practices

March 5th 6 – 8 PM

Thompson Hotel LES , 190 Allen St

Zulema Griffin proudly announces Who Owns Art?, an informal talk about co-option and ownership in contemporary art practices.  Organized by designer and filmmaker Zulema Griffin with Pool Art Fair, Who Owns Art? addresses notions of co-option in art practice and in the culture at large.

Ownership is the cornerstone of capitalism. The strained relationships between capitalism and the creative community force responses that push the boundaries of expression. This new dynamic also raises questions about how commercialization and mass production have affected how we understand creative practices.  Throughout history most cultures have developed a framework for individual ownership, but the technological advancements of the last 50 years, such as digital media, open source culture, Wiki code, and file sharing have raised concerns about intellectual property.

What are the relationships between intellectual property and art production?   What function does copyright play in our lives as cultural producers? How do we operate within the foundations of ownership while maintaining a vibrant public domain in the 21st century?  What are the implications of “Remix” culture?  The participating panelists are concerned with these and other artistic, philosophical, legal, and social issues.

This panel discussion is will follow a trailer viewing of the upcoming documentary Ink Bleach by Deux Conceptualiste Noir, a film about the co-option of Black aesthetics. The goal of Ink Bleach is to amplify the ongoing conversation about ownership.

Participating panelists are: Victor Davson, Kalia Brooks, Barron Claiborne, Rocio Alvarado, Zulema Griffin,.  Moderated by: Nicky Enright

Continue reading “LEC: Who Owns Art? a conversation @ Pool Art Fair New York 2011”

LEC: “Vodou, Islam, and the Making of the Afro-Atlantic” @ NYU

The New York University Postcolonial Colloquium presents a lecture with Prof. Aisha Khan.

“Vodou, Islam, and the Making of the Afro-Atlantic”
Date: Wednesday, March 9th, 6:30 p.m.
Place: 13-19 University Place, Room 222, New York University, NY, NY 10003

Aisha Khan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at New York University.  She is the author of Callaloo Nation: Metaphors of Race and Religious Identity among South Asians in Trinidad (Duke UP, 2004), and has published articles in numerous journals including the Journal of Historical Sociology, Small Axe, and Cultural Anthropology.  She is the co-editor of Empirical Futures: Anthropologists and Historians Engage the Work of Sidney W. Mintz (UNC Press, 2009) and editor of the forthcoming Islam and the Atlantic World.

For more information or to be added to our list, please visit www.nyupoco.com.