The Grapevine

SYMP: Cultural Mobility and Transcultural Confrontations: Winold Reiss as a Paradigm of Transnational Studies @ Berlin, Germany

The international symposium brings together scholars of the humanities – from both sides of the Atlantic – for the first-ever conference dedicated to the art of Winold Reiss (1886-1953) honoring the 125th anniversary of his birth. This extremely versatile German-American painter, designer, and teacher had once been celebrated by Du Pont Magazine (March 1931) as a “modern Cellini.” In the 1920s and 1930s, Reiss emerged as an influential figure in transatlantic encounters and modernist aesthetics. Recognized for his portraiture and commercial-design work, he was also much in demand for the elaborate mosaics he created for restaurants and other public buildings, including the Union Terminal in Cincinnati, Ohio. Reiss collaborated with leading artists and intellectuals including Alain Locke, Katherine Anne Porter, Paul Kellogg, Miguel Covarrubias, and Langston Hughes. Among his students was Aaron Douglas, the key African-American figure in the visual Harlem Renaissance. Reiss was also the main contributor to the visual narrative of the anthology The New Negro (1925).

Cultural Mobility and Transcultural Confrontations: Winold Reiss as a Paradigm of Transnational Studies will rethink Reiss’ role in the visual representation of ethnic American identities during the first half of the 20th century. A German element is woven into the fabric of his complex engagement with American ethnicity and with racial conflicts – the European artistic background he brought to the American scene demands a specifially interdisciplinary and international perspective. The symposium will examine this perspective, exploring aspects and processes of international exchange,  intercultural translation, and transcultural confrontations.

http://www.jfki.fu-berlin.de/en/v/winold-reiss/

Photographer Ernesto Fernández Nogueras Receives Cuba’s National Prize for Visual Arts 2011

CFP: 2012 BIENNIAL SCHOLARS’ CONFERENCE ON AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY

CALL FOR PAPERS
2012 BIENNIAL SCHOLARS’ CONFERENCE ON AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY
Center for Jewish History, New York City

The 2012 AJHS Scholars’ Conference will explore disciplinary and other
kinds of boundaries that currently confront the field of American
Jewish history. It will examine the opportunities and challenges that
arise from the engagement of history and the humanities (including
literary studies, media studies, theater, dance and art history,
cultural studies, and musicology) as well as the social sciences
(anthropology, economics, folklore, linguistics, political science,
psychology, sociology). The conference will also explore the impact
that the work of American Jewish historians has had on other
disciplines.

Looking beyond disciplinary boundaries raises various questions:  How
has the interdisciplinary study of American Jewry developed?  How does
the study of American Jewish history take shape in relation to area
studies or comparative programs, such as American Studies, Ethnic
Studies, Comparative Religions, or Jewish Studies?  What kinds of
cross-disciplinary engagements would best enhance the field of
American Jewish history?

In considering disciplinary boundaries, how do they compare with other
boundaries that figure in the work of American Jewish historians?
These other boundaries include:

*   Geographical boundaries (e.g., in studies of immigration or of
American Jews as part of a transnational or diasporic community)
*   Cultural boundaries (e.g., in studies that examine the relation
of Jews with their neighbors, comparative studies of Jews vis-à-vis
other groups, or the study of communities that test the limits of
Jewish peoplehood)
*   Discursive boundaries (e.g., in studies that engage non-verbal
forms of expression)
*   Institutional boundaries (in work that bridges the academy and
the arts, or institutions of public culture, or work that addresses a
general public audience or reflects Jewish communal concerns)

The committee invites proposals for papers that engage any of the
aforementioned issues and encourages the submission of complete panel
proposals and roundtable presentations. The organizers view the theme
of “beyond boundaries” very broadly, and will consider a wide range of
proposals bearing on all aspects of the American Jewish experience,
though preference will go to those that deal in some way with the
conference’s central theme.

Graduate students completing dissertations may submit proposals
accompanied by a letter of recommendation from their advisor. All
submissions must include a one-page (250 words) paper abstract, short
(120 words) biography, and a specific indication of technological
needs. Complete panel proposals are strongly encouraged. Please send
proposals to hsalomon@ajhs.org by November 15, 2011.

CFP: Representing the Irrepresentable: Narratives and Visual Images of Slavery, Forced Labor, and Genocide @ AHA 2013

CALL FOR PAPERS

Multi-Session Workshop: Representing the Irrepresentable: Narratives and
Visual Images of Slavery, Forced Labor, and Genocide

127th American Historical Association Meeting

New Orleans, January 3 – 6, 2013

Convened by Ana Lucia Araujo (Department of History; Howard University,
Washington, DC)

This workshop will gather scholars working on written narratives
(documents, autobiographies, personal journals, novels, etc.) and visual
images (painting, drawings, photographs, engravings, movies, etc.) dealing
with forced displacement, enslavement, slavery, forced labor, war, and
genocide. The various participants will engage in understanding how the
multiple dimensions of traumatic human experiences can be conveyed through
images and narratives. How historians can examine written and visible
representations of irrepresentable events? Can narratives and images
provide reliable and/or accurate information for historians to interpret
traumatic dimensions of past and present human experience? How historians
articulate the use of eyewitness accounts (visual and written) with
fiction (novel, films) in order to represent past traumatic experiences?
What are the limits, the challenges, and the possibilities faced by
historians who employ narratives and images of trauma in their works? By
focusing on various historical periods and geographical areas, scholars
are invited to submit proposals addressing these questions and examining
specific case studies. Papers focusing on the Atlantic slave trade and
slavery, colonialism in Africa, the Holocaust, Nazi labor camps, the
Armenian genocide, the Apartheid, the Rwandan genocide, the war in Darfur,
contemporary slavery, and human trafficking, are welcome.

Please send your paper proposal no later than February 1st 2012 to: aaraujo@howard.edu or analucia.araujo@gmail.com

Paper proposals must contain:

– Paper’s title

– Abstract (up to 300 words)

– Biographical paragraph (up to 250 words, no curriculum vitae, please)

– Correct mailing and e-mail address

– Audiovisual needs, if any

Chairs and commentators, please send:

– Biographical paragraph (up to 250 words, no curriculum vitae, please)

– Correct mailing and e-mail addresses

Please note:

– Abstracts of accepted proposals will be posted on the AHA program website.

– Papers must be submitted on December 1st 2012 for the panel commentators.

CFP: Pictures in motion: photography, empire, and resistance @ ASA 2012

Pictures in motion: photography, empire, and resistance

The announcement of photography’s invention in 1839 coincided with the rise
of imperial ambition in the United States and the development of
post-colonial states in the Americas. Since then, photographs have been in
constant circulation across this region, serving as instruments of both
imperial expansion and resistance. While the camera has documented people
and places in ways that define their subordinate relationship to centers of
power, it has also enabled subjects to undermine such power. For the 2012
Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association –“Dimensions of Empire
and Resistance: Past, Present, and Future,” November 15-18 in San Juan,
Puerto Rico–we are putting together a proposal for a session that examines
the cultural work done by photography’s circulation throughout the Americas.
We welcome papers that reflect on the photographic production,
dissemination, and reinterpretation of collective identities and/or
stereotypes. Papers that address the spread of photographic conventions and
their local adaptations are also appropriate, as are studies of photographic
practices that move between the center and periphery of imperial structures.
By December 15, 2011, please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words
and a current cv to: Elizabeth Hutchinson (ehutchin@barnard.edu) and Tanya
Sheehan (tsheehan@rci.rutgers.edu). Note that individuals may not
participate in more than one session at the ASA meeting.

CONF: African Studies Association (ASA) Museum Day – pre-ASA Conference

African Studies Association (ASA) Museum Day
Workshops on Sharing Cultural Knowledge
Smithsonian National Museum of African Art
950 Independence Avenue, SW
Take Metro to Smithsonian Station

If you have already registered for ASA and would still like to register for the pre-conference workshop at the National Museum of African Art, it’s not too late!  Please click on the link to a doodle poll that will allow you to select all or specific events taking place on Wednesday, November 16, 2011 (pre-conference day):  http://doodle.com/rr3pzh5c655vzqrx.  Registration is required by November 10, so we have an accurate count for catering.  The itinerary follows:

ASA Museum Day is a day-long series of workshops, archives and gallery tours, and guided collection storage visits at the National Museum of African Art (NMAfA).  Space is limited to 40 for workshops; 20 for the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives tour.  Collection storage visits are by appointment only and limited to 5 per section (20 total).

Continue reading “CONF: African Studies Association (ASA) Museum Day – pre-ASA Conference”

PUB: New Provincialisms: Curating Art of the African Diaspora

New Provincialisms: Curating Art of the African Diaspora

Posted on August 31, 2011 by blackatlanticresource| Leave a comment

La Fantasie Art Project (by caribbeanfreephoto via flickr)

New Provincialisms: Curating Art of the African Diaspora by Leon Wainwright is now available to read in full at the Black Atlantic Resource:

Over the past decade there have been various curatorial attempts to assemble and understand the art of the African diaspora and to offer a more global sense of the histories from which such works emerge. The diaspora concept once promised fresh possibilities for imagining community beyond the nation; however, its internationalist emphasis has given way to a provincializing attitude grounded in United States – centered experiences.

When art exhibitions are designed to mobilize the African diaspora and to reverse its traditional exclusion from art history and public memory, it is less clear whether such designs also prove capable of reversing the direction of this new provincialism. And yet, while the otherwise international relevance of the diaspora analytic has become susceptible to political and social priorities with a locus in the United States, much can be gained from interrogating the ways in which this locus generates new “margins” and “centers” in the world of art and blackness.

To view the full article at the Black Atlantic Resource now click here.

[First published in Radical History Review, Issue 103 (Winter 2009) pp. 203-213: http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1215/01636545-2008-041]

PUB: AUBREY WILLIAMS: ATLANTIC FIRE

AUBREY WILLIAMS: ATLANTIC FIRE

Posted on October 12, 2011 by blackatlanticresource| Leave a comment

Aubrey Williams: Atlantic Fire by Leon Wainwright is now available to read in full at the Black Atlantic Resource:

The paintings of Aubrey Williams are islands of fire that have scorched their way across a range of different stories of art. One story is about the evolution of British painting in the twentieth century. Another is a story about the way in which Caribbean people have struggled and pressed for their freedom and sparked with modern creativity. Yet another story has passages on Britain and Guyana, Jamaica, South America, and the United States, pulling in all those settings around the Atlantic where Aubrey Williams lived and worked, and where he exhibited his art. It is a story about how Williams had an ability to be in several places at once in the history of art. Williams’ legacy is framed within a brilliant composite of narratives; and there his art works have remained, smouldering continually, their heat slowly building. His life story and his art cannot be located in a simple geography, either physical or cultural. Williams painted with fire, and the path that he cut is a hard one to follow…

To view the full article at the Black Atlantic Resource now click here

To view Aubrey Williams’ artist page at the October Gallery, with images exhibited at the Atlantic Fire exhibition click here

Leon Wainwright, ‘Aubrey Williams: Atlantic Fire’, in Reyahn King ed., 2010 Aubrey Williams: Atlantic Fire National Museums Liverpool and October Gallery, London, pp. 46-55. ISBN: 978-1-899542-30-7. Exhibition catalogue essay. Republished here with permission of the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and The October Gallery, London.