15th Triennial Symposium on African Art

Conference Announcement, and a Call for A Conference Theme (Deadline Extended to March 15)

The 15th Triennial Symposium on African Art, founded by Richard Long in 1968 and now sponsored by the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA), will be hosted by the University of California, Los Angeles, beginning Wednesday, March 23, through Saturday, March 26, 2011. To initiate planning for the conference, the program committee is inviting submissions to identify a central theme as a focus for a core group of panels. As with almost all conference themes, the attention should be directed towards the most compelling current issues in the field. To encourage submissions, the committee will award the individual who submits the selected theme an even dozen of the forty plus African and African American volumes published by the Fowler Museum since its founding in 1963 (listed below).  To encourage membership and participation in the sponsoring organization, this offer is only available to members of ACASA.

In addition to a thematic title, the committee requests a one hundred word development of the theme. Please direct your submissions to program chair Doran H. Ross at dross@arts.ucla.edu by March 15, 2010. A formal call for panels and papers will follow at the end of March 2010. As with past Triennials, we want to maximize participation and will invite panels and papers on any topic or theme. And as always, there will be room for papers that do not otherwise have a panel.

THE ENTICEMENT

• Black Gods and Kings (1971)

• The Arts of Ghana (1977)

• Afro-American Arts from the Suriname Rain Forest (1980)

• Igbo Arts: Community and Cosmos (1984)

• Elephant: the Animal and Its Ivory in African Culture (1992)

• Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou (1995)

• Beads Body and Soul: Art and Light in the Yoruba Universe (1998)

• Ways of the River: Arts and Environment of the Niger Delta (2002)

• A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal (2003)

• Unwrapping Textile Traditions of Madagascar (2005)

• Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas (2008)

• Central Nigeria Unmasked: The Arts of the Benue River Valley (2011)

In addition to ACASA, at UCLA the Symposium is co-sponsored by: Fowler Museum at UCLA, African Arts and The James S. Coleman African Studies Center, Department of Art History and the UCLA College of Letters and Science, Division of Humanities, the Department of World Arts and Cultures and the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture, and the Institute of American Cultures.