The Grapevine

SYMP: American Art in Dialogue with Africa and its Diaspora @ Smithsonian American Art Museum, October 4-5, 2013

American Art in Dialogue with Africa and its Diaspora

Smithsonian American Art Museum | Eighth and G Streets NW, Washington, D.C.

October 4-5, 2013

This symposium examines the role of Africa and the African Diaspora in the development of art of the United States, from nineteenth-century portraiture to American modernism; from the Harlem Renaissance to the contemporary art world. Speakers include Chika Okeke-Agulu of Princeton University, Krista Thompson of Northwestern University, Jeffrey Stewart of the University of California, Santa Barbara, Celeste-Marie Bernier of the University of Nottingham, James Smalls of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and artist and distinguished scholar David C. Driskell. A full schedule is listed below. For more information, visit AmericanArt.si.edu/research/symposia/2013/terra/.

The event is free, but registration is required at www.America-Africa.eventbrite.com. The symposium will be available through a simultaneous webcast; an archived version will remain online indefinitely. Recordings of past symposia including “Encuentros: Artistic Exchange between the U.S. and Latin America” and “East-West Interchanges in American Art” are now available on the museum’s website, ArtBabble, YouTube, and iTunes U.

Continue reading “SYMP: American Art in Dialogue with Africa and its Diaspora @ Smithsonian American Art Museum, October 4-5, 2013”

CFP: “Life in My City Photo Africa” Photography Contest @ Life In My City Art Festival, Enugu, Nigeria

INTERNATIONAL PHOTO CONTEST: LIFE IN MY CITY PHOTO AFRICA

Life In My City Art Festival, Enugu, Nigeria, hereby invites entries for Life in My City Photo Africa as part of the 2013 Life In My City Art Festival holding in October 2013.

Photo Africa is an international photo contest for African photographers who will be not more than 35 years of age by October 12th, 2013, living and working in Africa.

Submitted works are expected to portray interesting current living conditions in the African city as seen through the lens of photographer, bearing in mind that one of the aims of the Life In My City Art Festival is to provide a platform for young artists to make meaningful statements about their environment.

Rules available at website www.lifeinmycityartsfestival.com

Lena Dunham is my Ike Turner*

This post is about the show Girls, but the title is very problematic. The author is not dealing with the racial polemics that have been raised with regards to this program, rather she reiterates the very problem with no self-awareness of the racial attitudes embedded in her statement.

PinotNinja's avatarStunted Adults

I am in an abusive relationship.

It’s with Girls.

On paper, Girls and I are perfect for each other.  People whose opinions I trust rave about it.  It wins awards.  I worship everything else that Judd Apatow has touched.  I constantly find myself in awkward situations.  And, just like the characters, I spent my 20s scraping by in Brooklyn.

Girls should be my jam.

But, its not.

If we’re being truthy, I can barely stand to watch it.  The characters alternately infuriate and repulse me.  I want to smack all four of them upside the head, show them what a flattering outfit looks like, teach them some basic manners and courtesy, and then put them on a train out of my beloved Brooklyn because, even more than the mustachioed mandolin-toting hipsters who flooded my hood and drove up my rent, they do not deserve to be there.  And…

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First Exposure Symposium at Northeastern University, Friday, April 26, 2013

nikkigphd's avatarNikki G Ph.D.

Image

I am very excited about presenting another installment on my ruminations on FUNK at the inaugural symposium of First Exposure, the culmination of a full academic year of reading, meeting, and discussing scholarship in The Dark Room: A Faculty Seminar on Race and Visual Culture, primarily convened at Northeastern University through the rigorous efforts of Assistant Professor of English, Kimberly Juanita Brown. My paper is titled, “Personifying Funk: Lessons Learned from Adrian Piper and Renée Stout,” wherein I will discuss how both artists embodied funk, physically and philosophically in such a way as to resist the limitations of the “triple negation of colored women artists.” I will consider Piper’s Funk Lessons and Renée Stout’s Fetish #2 and her personas, in particular.

There are so many brilliant topics by scholars from across the country with keynote addresses by María Magdalena Campos-Pons and Saidiya Hartman. This symposium will be invigorating and enlightening…

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Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies

Sebastian Alvarez's avatarWANDERLUST

Imaginations is an international journal hosted at the University of Alberta in Canada that publishes peer-reviewed articles in original languages as well as translations and commissioned artwork. Imaginations acts as a nexus, or aggregation point, where excellent scholarship informed by different cultures, national histories and linguistic traditions can create a new vocabulary for addressing the notion of the image along with its many avatars, and where academic researchers can also come in contact with visual artists and practitioners reflecting on their approaches. The disciplinary and cultural contacts inspire new dialogues and parallelisms, or even differences and potential frictions, out of which shall necessarily emerge unforeseen insights into the role of the image and visual culture.

Read Imaginations HERE

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The Political Dimension of Visual Culture in Latin America

gala2013's avatarmodernlatinamericanart

Visual culture in Latin America, like visual culture everywhere, is shaped and influenced by the social and political histories that define the realities of the place. The interaction of local traditions with outside cultural influences is instrumental in the formation of social reality.  When considering the elements of visual culture: art and photography, film and television, news and advertising, architecture, fashion, design, and the very look of contemporary life itself, the integration of these images is what constructs social, political and cultural meaning in the creation of identity. 

In the varied nations that constitute Latin America, manifestations of visual culture are inextricably bound to a history of colonization and military dictatorship.  Throughout each nation’s struggle for independence, civil war and the horrors of state imposed terror have (to staggering degrees and at varying periods during the twentieth century) informed visual culture with a uniquely political dimension.  The belief that art…

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Conference: Encounters, Affinities, Legacies – the 18th Century in the Present Day