The Grapevine

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

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”

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

March 5^th 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 21^st 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”

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.