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CFP: Blk Art Group Research Project 30th Anniversary Conference @ Wolverhampton University

Blk Art Group Research Project

30th Anniversary Conference

Wolverhampton University

Saturday 27th and Sunday 28th October 2012

CALL FOR PAPERS

The conference aims to enable and share scholarship and research into the ‘Black Art Movement’, it’s core debates, precursors and legacies.

By bringing together artists, curators, historians and scholars we hope to add to the pool of knowledge surrounding the ‘black art movement’; to encourage those scholars already active in this field to further develop and share their work and to uncover work that may have gone unpublished or remain obscured.

This is a call for papers that contribute to the debate through the detailed and critical examination of a single work, body of work or group of works.  Whilst the conference aims to focus on the 80s, papers may include works that were produced prior to the 80s or later as long as there is a clear rationale for their consideration in this context.

Finished papers should be suitable for a presentation of approximately 20 minutes. We ask that abstracts of up to 300 words and a brief biography should reach us at blkartgroupresearchproject@gmail.com by Friday 20th July.

Continue reading “CFP: Blk Art Group Research Project 30th Anniversary Conference @ Wolverhampton University”

PUB: Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies – Volume 33, Issue 2

 

Section of particular interest:

In Plain Sight: Breaking the Textual Bind

Celeste-Marie Bernier, ‘A “Typical Negro” or a “Work of Art?” The
“inner” via the “outer man” in Frederick Douglass’s Manuscripts and
Daguerreotypes’

Fionnghuala Sweeney, ‘Visual Culture and Fictive Technique in
Frederick Douglass’ The Heroic Slave’

Lisa Merrill, ‘Exhibiting Race “Under the World’s Huge Glass Case”:
William and Ellen Craft and William Wells Brown at the Great
Exhibition in Crystal Palace, London, 1851’

Taylor & Francis Online :: Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies – Volume 33, Issue 2.

Representations of Slavery Symposium Audio Now Online!

blackatlanticresource's avatarBlack Atlantic Resource Debate

We are happy to announce that audio recordings for the symposium recently held at Newcastle University – Representations of Slavery in Neoliberal Times – are now freely available online.

The recordings of papers and subsequent roundtable discussion are available to listen to on the School of Arts and Cultures webpages, these include:

Alternative Empathies: Representing Slavery’s Affective Afterlives
, Carolyn Pedwell, Newcastle University

Negative Positives: The Guardian, The Slave, The Wit and The Money, 
Lubaina Himid, Centre for Contemporary Art, University of Central Lancashire

Debt, Freedom and Slavery in Neoliberal Times,
 Julia O’Connell Davidson, University of Nottingham

To listen to these recordings click here. Thanks to sympoisum organiser Daniel McNeil for letting us know about this great resource.

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Film revealing economic power of Diaspora to be screened at Caribbean Diaspora Forum

CFP: Journal of Art Historiography Special Issue on African Art

The *Journal of Art Historiography*, a peer reviewed journal (http://arthistoriography.wordpress.com),
is interested in producing a special issue on African art.

The discursive practice of African art history is at a crucial juncture, in which rising interest in African art from a global perspective intersects with a possible fragmentation of the field into divergent disciplines each with its own focus. The historiography of African visual arts itself confronts an cross-disciplinary problem identified by *Journal of Art Historiography* as a concern that “contemporary scholarship will forget its earlier legacy and neglect the urgency and rigour with which those early debates were conducted. The journal is therefore committed to studying art historical scholarship, in its institutional and conceptual foundations, from the past to the present in all areas and all periods”.

African art history is particularly in need of this historiographical examination, given the increasing distance between early scholarship and contemporary discourses. The last significant historiography of the field was carried out by the venerable Monni Adams in a classical essay titled “African Visual Arts from an Art Historical Perspective (*African Studies Review*, 32/2, 1989: 55-103), which formed a two part overview of African Studies published in journal, the other written by Paula Ben Amos.

Although African Arts has engaged the issue of African art’s discourse in various presentations in the journal to date, the kind of comprehensive analysis carried out by Monni Adams has largely been absent and is in dire need of
being updated, given how much has happened in the field in the two and half decades since the article was published. The *Journal of Historiography*’s special issue on African arts therefore provides a unique opportunity to revisit the history of art writing on the subject of African visual culture and create a critical dialogue between various generations of African art historians, which will ideally allow foundational research and writing to be subjected to contemporary knowledge practices.

I have been asked to serve as guest editor this proposed issue. I will like to invite proposals for articles on the subject and also appeal to the field to suggest important texts and documents that might be included in this special issue. Previous editions of the journal can be viewed on its website (http://arthistoriography.wordpress.com) for guidance on the Journal of Art Historiography’s focus and submission guidelines.

Please send proposals and suggestions to:

Prof. Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie
ogbechie@gmail.com
Guest Editor, *Journal of Art Historiography* Special Issue on African art

Emory University acquires rare collection of historical African-American photos

PUB: THIN BLACK LINE(S)

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Lubaina Himid, Thin Black Line(s): Moments and Connections During the 1980s for the Women Artists (2011)

The exhibition Thin Black Line(s) closed at Tate Britain in March, but the exhibition catalog is an invaluable record of the show’s commemoration of “Black British art” in the 1980s. The catalog reproduces the work of Sutapa Biswas, Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Claudette Johnson, Ingrid Pollard, Veronica Ryan, and Maud Sulter; it also includes archival material documenting that decade of creative and progressive political alliances among these artists of African, Asian, and Caribbean descent. ISBN 978-0-9571579-0-3