The Grapevine

FEL: Mellon Curatorial Fellowship for African-American Art @ Birmingham Museum of Art

Mellon Fellowship Job Description
The Mellon Fellowship offers a post-doctoral candidate the opportunity to gain professional curatorial experience in a major museum setting.  The Fellow is primarily responsible for collection- and exhibition-related research focusing on African-American art and artists and related issues, with an emphasis on developing engaging exhibitions and publications, researching and identifying acquisitions through purchase and gift, audience development, fundraising and public relations, and additional duties as appropriate to specific projects.
The Museum boasts impressive holdings of African-American art in a wide variety of media by artists such as Henry Ossawa Tanner, Robert S. Duncanson, Bill Traylor, Jacob Lawrence, Gordon Parks, Ernest Withers, Thornton Dial, Jack Whitten, Lorna Simpson, Kerry James Marshall, Carrie Mae Weems, Glenn Ligon, Odili Donald Odita and numerous others.  In addition to this impressive foundation, there exists an avid local collector base and a concentrated commitment on the Museum’s part to further acquisitions of African-American art, especially the work of emerging and mid-career artists.  The Birmingham Museum of Art aims to amass a world-class collection that illuminates the range of motivations, creativity and aesthetics of black artists working in all artistic media, with the eventual goal of being a center and requisite destination for anyone with an interest in viewing, studying and researching the art of 20th– and 21st-century African-American artists.
The position reports to the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and also works in close association with the Curator of American Art. As a two-year, full-time commitment, the Fellow is exposed to all aspects of curatorial operations and participates in the daily activities of the Museum’s curatorial department.  With a start date as early as July 1, 2011, the fellowship carries a yearly salary of $44,000 plus selected benefits. Additional operating resources are designated to support the research and implementation of programs and exhibitions devised by the Mellon Fellow.
Qualifications
The successful candidate must hold a Ph.D. in art history with demonstrated expertise of African-American art, and strong collaborative and organizational skills. In addition, the Fellow must be a passionate and energetic person with the ability to manage, research, exhibit, and develop an important collection. S/he must have the interest and ability to share the collection with diverse audiences and to build a positive image and lasting relationships for the Birmingham Museum of Art. S/he must be an innovative thinker and a great communicator with the ability to present the African-American art collection to all internal and external constituencies and must have a reputation for the highest level of integrity and credibility.
Museum Description
Founded in 1951, the Birmingham Museum of Art is one of the premier museums of the southeast, with a collection of over 24,000 objects that represent a rich panorama of international cultures, past and present.  Six curators oversee the collection in the areas of European Art, Modern and Contemporary Art, Decorative Art, Asian Art, Arts of Africa and the Americas, and American Art.  The Museum’s educational programs are designed around the collection and special exhibitions, and provide opportunities for all ages and levels of experience to connect with art. Visit www.artsbma.org for more information.
Procedure for application
Applicants must submit a curriculum vitae, contact information for three references, and a statement specifying: 1) the applicant’s research goals; 2) how these goals relate to or will benefit the Birmingham Museum of Art and Birmingham community; 3) and how resources at the BMA might be used to accomplish these goals.
The application deadline is May 27, 2011, however review of applications will be ongoing and applications received after the deadline may be considered. The Birmingham Museum of Art is an Equal Opportunity Employer.  Qualified minority applicants are strongly encouraged to apply. Application materials should be sent to:
Jeannine O’Grody
Chief Curator
Birmingham Museum of Art
2000 Rev. Abraham Woods, Jr. Blvd.
Birmingham, AL 35203
jogrody@artsbma.org

 

REF: “Slavery in Canada” website

http://www.canadachannel.ca/slavery/index.php/Welcome_to_the_Slavery_in_Canada_Portal

A new online resource in the history of slavery and the abolitionist movement in Canada entitled “Slavery in Canada.” This resource was developed for Heritage Canada (a federal government department in Canada) for students in grades 5 to 10 (ages 11-16).

SYMP: “BLACK IS…BLACK AIN’T” @ Indiana University

“BLACK IS…BLACK AIN’T”: RECONCEPTUALIZING THE AFRICAN DIASPORA, An Interdisciplinary Symposium

Keynote Speaker: Professor Michele Wallace

Saturday, March 26, 2011
8:15 AM – 6:00 PM

Indiana University-Bloomington, Indiana
Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center

Program information and flyer: http://www.indiana.edu/~afroamer/CFPs.html

Description

The African Diaspora has been historically conceived as originating with the Transatlantic Slave trade. However, some would argue that to perceive the African Diaspora only in relation to slavery is to obscure alternative means of conceptualizing the movement of Black bodies. As scholars committed to interdisciplinary research, the Graduate Society of the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University brings together scholars, community activists, artists, and other professionals to interrogate definitions of, theorize about, and imagine new possibilities for the African Diaspora.

Symposium papers will address the following topics:
* What are the practical applications of African American and African Diaspora Studies/Black Studies in the 21st century?
* How do migrations – local, national and international – affect diasporic identities?
* How does contemporary audio/visual media and popular culture help to re-imagine the borders of diasporic communities?
* How do outliers serve as change agents in these communities?
* What are the ways that the academy can engage in constructive dialogues with nonacademic communities?

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

Continue reading “LEC: Imaging Black Europe @ Goethe-Institut, March 24, 2011”

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.