The Grapevine
Cuban Art: Centennial Exhibitions in Havana
EDITORIAL: An Invitation to Critical Dialogue
The National Biennial 2012, which closed in March, was, as Charles Campbell put it in his excellent review, a powerful and demanding exhibition that reflected the expansive growth of contemporary art in Jamaica and its Diaspora. It captured a cultural moment that is energetic, expansive and enthusiastic and viewers and commentators responded accordingly, with unprecedented enthusiasm that left us very encouraged about current directions in Jamaican art and the development of the NGJ itself.
Charles Campbell rightly cautioned, however, that the present cultural moment is also very self-congratulatory and lacks the supporting critical discourse that is needed to make the current growth spurt fully meaningful and sustainable, culturally and intellectually. The NGJ team recognizes this problem and it is in actuality part of our responsibilities to facilitate and promote critical discourse within and about the Jamaican art world, in its broadest sense. We also recognize the need to extend this…
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LEC: “Negro Cloth” by Seth Rockman @ The New School
The New School History Department and the Market Cultures Group NYC
invites you to attend:
“Negro Cloth: Mastering the Market for Slave Clothing in Antebellum America”
Seth Rockman
Associate Professor of History
Brown University
Monday, May 6 @ 6pm
80 Fifth Avenue, Room 529
This talk considers the emergence of the American “negro cloth” industry in
the 1820s and 1830s. At the intersection of material culture studies,
business history, and comparative slavery, this talk traces the circuits of
social knowledge that complemented the circuits of capital in the
simultaneous expansion of the factory and the plantation. Enslaved men
and women played a collaborative role in the design of particular textiles,
and their preferences for some products and critiques of others structured
patterns of labor hundreds of miles away. The research is drawn from a
larger study underway on the inter-regional trade in plantation provisions:
Northern-made hats, hoes, shoes, shovels, and even whips manufactured
for use on Southern slave plantations.
Seth Rockman is associate professor of History at Brown University. His
2009 book Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early
Baltimore won several awards, including the Merle Curti Prize from the
Organization of American Historians. Rockman’s essay on the Jacksonian Era
appears in the recent American History Now volume published by the American
Historical Association. His findings on North-South economic ties have been
previewed in the New York Times “Disunion” blog and the Bloomberg News
“Echoes” blog. Rockman serves on the governing board of Brown University’s
Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.
CFP: Native American Art Studies Association Conference @ Denver
The Native American Art Studies Association’s 2013 conference will be in Denver, October 16-19th. The Call for Papers can be found in their latest newsletter (19.2) at NAASA’s website – http://nativearts.org/conferences/
Paper proposals are due May 15, 2013.
CFP: “Visualizing the Riot” an ACRAH-Sponsored Session @ CAA 2014
Visualizing the Riot
2014 College Art Association Annual Conference, Chicago, Il.
Chairs Eddie Chambers and Rose Salseda, University of Texas at Austin
Please submit proposals to eddiechambers@austin.utexas.edu and rsalseda@gmail.com
DUE MAY 6, 2013
Session Abstract:
Throughout the twentieth century, riots have been an intermittent yet pronounced aspect of urban history. Primarily due to the violence they embody, riots draw particular types of attention from mainstream media and arguably pass into history, as well as the popular imagination, in various skewed and problematic ways. In contrast, many artists have made fascinating, sophisticated works that reference specific episodes of rioting. Surprisingly, given the power of the artworks and the devastating effects of rioting, scant curatorial and scholarly attention is paid to how artists visualize riots. Therefore, this session seeks to address some of these seldom-considered issues. The co-chairs seek proposals from art historians, curators, and artists who have explored the visualization of riots. In addition, they hope to secure contributions that critically examine the dominant tropes of rioting, such as burning buildings, looting, and so on, that have become a familiar aspect of mainstream reportage.
See the official 2014 CFP at http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/2014CallforParticipation.pdf (listed on page six).
How to Paint Ghosts: An Interview with Ivorian artist Aboudia
“Artists don’t create reality they make phantasms”, using a kind of “fantastical technique to produce an artificial dream for the waking world”. At least that’s what Plato thought. In the paintings of Aboudia, we cannot be sure if the figures are alive or dead, if the nightmare they inhabit is reality or fabrication. The figures are drawn in the brutal and naive style of a child, but they are not so easily identified: these are not the same photogenic children pictured on adverts for development funds and charities, inviting paternalistic investment, but sketchy, ghostly figures whose mouths are not prettily silent or widely smiling but cancelled out, eyes not vacant but withdrawn, their speech impossible and thoughts illegible, they are unavailable to the viewer, but their unknowability confronts us like a crisis.
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Jamaica’s Liguanea Art Festival Celebrates 10 Years!
Looking Back on FESPACO 2013
The 23rd edition of the famed West African film festival FESPACO ran last month in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. We previewed it here. Since the festival, we asked two filmmakers—Newton Aduaka (who attended) and Haile Gerima (who stayed away)—and one film critic and academic, Mbye Cham (who served as president of the Official Jury for Long Feature Films at FESPACO in 2011), to give us their respective takes on the festival. First up is Professor Cham, who is chair of Howard University’s African Studies Department and who has published widely on themes related to African film.
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Apartheid in Manhattan: The International Center for Photography’s “Rise and Fall of Apartheid”
The International Center for Photography (ICP) is located in the heart of Manhattan, at the corner of West 43rd Street and the Avenue of the Americas. Nearby, Times Square’s mirages—brilliant expanses of neon fantasies, some spanning the length of several stories and the breadth of entire city blocks—summon passers-by with images of athletes, models, slick tans and racy footwear. There are some visible traces of “Africa”: West African men sell pashmina scarves, woollen hats, and gloves in street corner stalls, and Disney’s “The Lion King” rules Broadway—now in its fifteenth year running, the show has a stretch of window displays dedicated to re-instituting Africa as a place of masks, skins, and noble, half-human animals.
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ACRAH 