Panels
Title: CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN DANCE: ISSUES OF DEFINITION AND CONTEXT
Chair 1: Josephine Ebiuwa Abbe
Email: jossyeka@yahoo.com; jossyeabbe@gmail.com
Abstract: Contemporary dance practice is a global cultural phenomenon. However, dancers and choreographers as well as scholars of dance are often confused about its manifestations in Africa, and its distinction from other forms of dance. Participants in this panel will seek to address this confusion by defining and exploring what “contemporary dance” may in fact mean in Africa and the Diaspora.
Seeking additional participants: YES
Title: MODERN CREATIVE ENDEAVORS AND OWNERSHIP OF INDIGENOUS WEST AFRICAN CULTURAL AND ARTISTIC EXPRESSIONS
Chair 1: Richard Acquaye
Email: richard.acquaye@ttu.edu.gh
Chair 2: Rikki Wemega-Kwawu
Email: rikdee2000@gmail.com
Abstract: This panel will open a wider public conversation about the commodification of West African traditional art and cultural products in all aspects of modern creative endeavours. It will explore the concept of commodification and sustainability of cultural productions and artistic expressions in the light of global capitalism. Two operating viewpoints would be interrogated; the first is that referencing from cultural products and artistic expressions may be motivated by a genuine desire to establish continuity in tradition to engender universality. And the second, which is an opposing concept, is that commodification/modification of cultural and artistic expressions will debase traditions and practices.
Seeking additional participants: YES
Title: New Conversations on Art and Creativity for Sustainable Development in Africa
Chair 1: John Tokpabere Agberia
Email: jtagberia@gmail.com
Chair 2: Babson Ajibade
Email: babson.ajibade@yahoo.com
Abstract: Noting the cultural dimensions of development and change, the UNESCO’s Seoul Agenda (2010) insists that the “arts” play vital roles in the “constructive transformation” of today’s technology driven society, where various sociocultural injustices prevail. Given the vibrancy and diversity of culture production and consumption in Africa, there is then a wider need for understanding sustainable development within the continent through its knowledge economy, built on diverse forms of artistic creativity. This panel seeks papers that address sustainable development and social change in Africa from the point of view of artistic practices, creativity, production and consumption.
Seeking additional participants: YES
Title: Looking Out, Looking In: Translocal Artistic Networks in the Maghreb
Chair 1: Cynthia Becker
Email: cjbecker@bu.edu
Abstract: The premise of this panel is based on a question raised by Arjun Appadurai: “What is the nature of locality as a lived experience in a globalized deterritorialized world?” His question suggests that localities are produced in relation to transnational networks. Using the translocal as a conceptual tool, this panel looks at the networks of exchange and encounter that have shaped artistic production in the Maghreb, concentrating on the mid-twentieth century to the present. Papers should address how Maghrebi artists have relied on wide global networks but also use local referents as they negotiate issues of migration, territory, and belonging.
Seeking additional participants: NO
Title: Retrospective Visions: Disrupting the canon/creating the canon: African artists in the 20th and 21st centuries
Chair 1: Jean Borgatti
Email: jborgatti@gmail.com
Abstract: Contemporary African and Diaspora artists have extended the postmodern aspects of 20th and 21st century community based African art by reconfiguring historic forms into such gallery-focused works of art as Hervé Youmbi’s totems, Kader Attian’s mirror masks, and Zak Ové’s sculptural installations. This panel hopes to examine the work of contemporary artists to determine their intent in incorporating such material into their work, and to take a retrospective view of how those artists have developed from their early work into their current (mature or maturing) styles.
Seeking additional participants: YES
Title: Shared Viewing: the use of photography as a tool for Africanist art historical research in the field.
Chair 1: Craniv Boyd
Email: Craniv.boyd@fu-berlin.de
Abstract: Photography is a long-standing tool for art historical and visual anthropological research. The aim of this panel is to discuss moments of shared viewing of photographs (images that contain either African art or representations of cultural events in Africa) with people in Africa, and the importance that such encounters can have on research. What is the impact that photographs as physical objects have on local artists? What do the personal archives of artists living in Africa look like? And more importantly how do Africans themselves narrate the images that contain
information about their art and visual culture?
Seeking additional participants: YES
Title: Narrative Visions
Chair 1: Nichole Bridges
Email: nichole.bridges@slam.org
Abstract: Whether through representational, abstract, or other forms, African visual arts may embody, document, or facilitate narratives. Soliciting artists and scholars of art history, languages, literature, and performance, panelists will examine intersections between art and narrative broadly defined to encompass social commentary, allegory, proverbs, and tellings of history, memory, destiny, and more. While heeding cautions against interpreting art objects as rote derivations of oral tradition, papers will explore the convergence of art and orality, complicate the reach of the “visual-verbal nexus,” and examine more elastic sensibilities of narrative than Western constructs as something fixed or sequential.
Seeking additional participants: YES
Title: Cross-media, Cross-genre in Modern African Arts
Chair 1: Joshua Cohen
Email: jcohen2@ccny.cuny.edu
Chair 2: Delinda Collier and Olubukola A Gbadegesin
Email: dcollier@saic.edu; ogbadege@slu.edu
Abstract: This panel focuses a “multi-media” lens on modern African arts (1950s-70s) in relation to the contemporary. Studies of African modernisms have burgeoned in recent decades. Yet to what extent has new scholarship reinforced older media categorizations? As Delinda Collier argues in a forthcoming book, “African art’s intermediality […] has haunted modernism’s search for the singular and increasingly literal object of art.” Not only did art and politics evolve together, but medium and genre distinctions often collapsed, giving rise to new configurations fusing various expressive forms, while at the same time depolarizing “high” and “mass” cultures.
Seeking additional participants: NO
Title: An Artist’s Medium is Her Message: Aesthetic Plurality in Black Atlantic Arts
Chair 1: Kyrah Malika Daniels
Email: kyrah.daniels@bc.edu
Abstract: This panel examines the plurality of Black Atlantic artistic media by highlighting visual and embodied aesthetic practices of Africa and the African Diaspora. Exploring artistic traditions from Haiti, Cuba, Congo-Kinshasa, and the United States, these four papers demonstrate how an artist’s choice of medium reveals the power of certain materials to tell a specific story. Collectively, we explore the art of collage, photography, flags, paintings, and mirrors, considering each medium’s respective work in an artist’s oeuvre.
Seeking additional participants: NO
Title: Africa/America at Independence
Chair 1: Laura De Becker
Email: ldbecker@umich.edu
Chair 2: Perrin Lathrop
Email: plathrop@princeton.edu
Abstract: This panel proposes to explore the contributions by artists based in Africa and the United States who were in close conversation in the period immediately preceding and following independence in Africa. Numerous artists forged professional and personal connections with colleagues from across the Atlantic that significantly influenced their own work and practice. In this panel, we invite scholars who have studied these artists to explore resonances between their oeuvres, as well as reflect on the 1950s through the 1970s as a particularly energetic time for trans-Atlantic and pan-African conversations.
Seeking additional participants: YES
Title: Fugitive Spiritualities: Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic, Session One
Chair 1: Angie Epifano
Email: angie.epifano@yale.edu
Chair 2: Alexandra M. Thomas
Email: alexandra.m.thomas@yale.edu
Abstract: Session One of “Fugitive Spiritualties” offers five papers by emerging scholars, which will work in concert with the presentations by established scholars given in Session Two. Queering black Atlantic spirituality and visual culture negotiates between hegemonic structures and “the fugitive,” or that which transgresses (hetero)normativity. Our papers collectively work towards definitions of the queer black Atlantic, while arguing for the relevance of queer theory to the study of African and Afro-Atlantic art history, particularly as it relates to spiritual practices.
Seeking additional participants: NO
Title: Narrating Historical Artists and Workshops
Chair 1: Carlee Forbes
Email: csforbes@arts.ucla.edu
Abstract: This panel highlights emerging research on named, identifiable historical artists and workshops. Processes of collecting, exhibiting, and classifying objects have often obscured (or even erased) specifics regarding an object’s creation. Intensive object-based and archival studies have identified stand out cases such as: Olowe of Ise and various “master hands,” including the Buli master and Segou master. Using archives, collections, and popular memory, these papers seek to more fully uncover narratives about the lives, works, and historical context of artists and workshops.
Seeking additional participants: NO
Title: Artworlds in the Making: New Institutions and the Formation of African Art
Chair 1: Till Förster
Email: till.foerster@unibas.ch
Chair 2: Lotte Knakkergaard Nielsen
Email: lotte.nielsen@unibas.ch
Abstract: Since the turn of the century, new art institutions have emerged across Africa. Community centres, grassroot organisations, neighbourhood associations and a plethora of other institutions challenge the dominance of well-established players as biennial arts festivals and cultural centres funded by international donors. This changing landscape of art institutions has immediate relevance for all who have an interest in the arts— artists and their critics, curators and sponsors, spectators and collectors. We invite papers that explore how this transformation, which often unsettles conventional, Western understandings of the arts, raises many conceptual, experiential and practical questions.
Seeking additional participants: YES
Title: Afro-Latin Arts: New Research, New Paradigm
Chair 1: Cécile Fromont
Email: cecile.fromont@yale.edu
Chair 2: Ximena Gómez
Email: xgomez@umass.edu
Abstract: This panel explores Afrolatinidad/ Afrolatinidade / the Afro-latin as a new paradigm for the study of the expressive cultures of men and women of African origins or descent in the Americas. It highlights new research on Afro-Latin arts from the first moments of the African presence in the Americas circa 1500 to the present that presents historiographic or methodological reflections on the Afro Latin in comparison and contrast to the notion of diasporic art.
Seeking additional participants: YES
Title: How Do Scholars Think Differently about Historical Evidence and the Arts When They Turn to Digital Mapping?
Chair 1: Susan Gagliardi
Email: susan.e.gagliardi@emory.edu
Abstract: Historians, including Africanist art historians, who turn to computational analysis continue to experience disciplinary discomfort with the approach even when it requires them to examine historical evidence in fresh ways. Historians’ longstanding preference for text and distrust of data-driven visualizations likely fuels this discomfort. This panel will focus on historical documents and other types of evidence long considered the purview of historians. Presenters will consider how humanists’ turn to computational analysis has reshaped understanding of their sources and the past.
Seeking additional participants: NO
Title: Digital Technologies and African Visual Cultures
Chair 1: Amanda Gilvin
Email: agilvin@gmail.com
Abstract: Ronald Eglash and others have demonstrated how today’s digital technologies trace their mathematical foundations back to the use of fractals in African visual cultures and knowledge systems. Late 20th century theorization of Afrofuturism continues to impact ideas around Africa and technology. Today, artists from Africa and the African Diaspora innovate in and offer critical perspectives on new technologies, including augmented reality, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. This panel invites papers about artists of Africa and the African Diaspora impacting the development of digital technologies, presenting original perspectives on them, or proposing alternative visions of human technological engagement.
Seeking additional participants: YES
Title: Friends with Benefits? – Patronage and Artistic Agency in African Modernisms
Chair 1: Katharina Greven
Email: K.Greven@gmix.de
Chair 2: Nadine Siegert
Email: siegert@iwalewabooks.com
Abstract: Art patrons often serve as facilitators and mediators, organizing exhibitions and workshops and publishing on the artists they have been working with. Furthermore, patrons building art collections often formed the foundation for institutions bringing the shift from private to public activities. This panel invites papers reflecting on different models of art patronage and patron’s networks in the context of African Modernisms. Of interest are case studies as well as theoretical reflections from multi-disciplinary perspectives.
Seeking additional participants: YES
Title: Transparency, Ethics, and Economics: Working with Living Masquerade Artists
Chair 1: Lisa Homann
Email: lhomann@uncc.edu
Chair 2: Jordan Fenton
Email: fentonja@miamioh.edu
Abstract: This panel concerns ethical methods of working with living artists to commission new masquerade ensembles. It exposes the logistical processes and pitfalls of such commissions, addressing the ways in which relationships between foreign researcher or studio artist to masquerade artists pose important methodological questions. Whether working seasonally or full-time, masquerade artists thrive on their reputations, which are often based on marrying artistic innovation, technical quality, and an understanding of local and oreign markets. The panel addresses both the ethical and creative dimensions of realizing a masquerade commission and pays careful attention to the roles individuals play in that process.
Seeking additional participants: NO
Title: Colonial Collecting and Provenance Research
Chair 1: Erica Jones
Email: epjones@arts.ucla.edu
Abstract: This panel highlights current research in European and American museums related to provenance as an avenue for addressing issues raised in the many public calls for repatriation of African material culture. Panelists representing European and American museums will present a series of case studies aimed at examining the ways that curators and conservators are contending with complex histories as they research and exhibit objects collected during the colonial period. These case studies will consider objects created for commercial trade or tourists, how objects were modified over time for the market (both within and outside of Africa). It draws from both archival and material analysis.
Seeking additional participants: NO
Title: New Horizons in Museum Culture: Reframing and Remixing African Art
Chair 1: Bennetta Jules-Rosette
Email: bjulesrosette@ucsd.edu
Chair 2: J.R. Osborn
Email: who3@georgetown.edu
Abstract: Museums in Africa and beyond are currently experimenting with new formats of exhibition and display in order to attract larger audiences. This panel addresses how artworks and cultural artifacts are produced, circulated, exhibited, and remixed in global contexts. It follows trajectories of representation and exhibition inside and outside of museums and traces the flow of objects from heritage and remembrance to use and consumption. The panel introduces new models and methodologies for museum studies and concludes with an assessment of how museums operate in legitimizing performances and artworks as part of their resilience and appeal to broader audiences.
Seeking additional participants: NO
Title: Fashion in Ghana
Chair 1: Malika Kraamer
Email: mk440@leicester.ac.uk
Chair 2: Innocent Kwashie Honyah
Email: fashionpivot@gmail.com
Abstract: Fashion in Africa is in vogue. Ghana, with its highly fashion-conscious population, has many complex networks of influence and inspiration that often are in dynamic relationships with various, sometimes, overlapping regional, transnational and global fashion systems. This panel brings both practitioners and observers of fashion and dress cultures in Ghana together, allowing multiple, often debated, understandings of Ghana’s fashion systems, past and present. Taking a Ghana-centered vantage point opens up the possibility to appreciate the complex ways in which constantly changing dress styles in Ghana develop and become globalized.
Seeking additional participants: YES
Title: Africans and the Object: Toward a New Museology?
Chair 1: Frederick Lamp
Email: ctbicycle1@gmail.com
Abstract: À propos of the debate on restitution, what are African sensibilities about the object? Are Africans not interested in contemplating material objects divorced from their performative context? What is there, historically, that resembles the Western phenomena of collecting, conserving, maintaining, storing, displaying, and connoisseurship? What about the dialectic between permanence and change? Is there more interest in the process of art, as opposed to the product? What of the ritual cycle of creation and destruction? Are there African models that could serve in the construction of a new African museology? Or is the museum antithetical to African aesthetic values?
Seeking additional participants: YES
Title: The Representation of Lusophone African Art in US Museums
Chair 1: Felicia Mings
Email: fmings@saic.edu
Chair 2: Hendrik Folkerts
Email: hfolkerts@artic.edu
Abstract: Histories of modern art in lusophone Africa have been relatively underrepresented in museums in the United States. Taking as its point of departure the exhibitions Malangatana: Mozambique Modern and Jo Ractliffe: Drives at the Art Institute of Chicago, this panel brings together scholars, whose research focuses on histories of visual art, photography and performance in Mozambique, Angola and other Porteguese-speaking countries in Africa.
Seeking additional participants: NO
Title: Art and Diplomacy in Africa
Chair 1: Ashley Miller
Email: avmiller@umich.edu
Abstract: This panel critically examines the entanglement of art and diplomacy in Africa. Papers will consider the ethical, political, practical, and creative issues surrounding the mobilization of art and expressive cultures—as well as artists and art institutions—in projects of cultural diplomacy initiated both within and outside of the continent. We also ask, what has been or might be the impact of diplomatic projects on the production of art and expressive culture in Africa; and what are the consequences or unexpected opportunities that arise when arts diplomacy fails?
Seeking additional participants: YES
Title: Beyond “modernisms”: African art in the light of South Atlantic theories and circulations
Chair 1: Sabrina Moura
Email: sabrinamourad@gmail.com
Chair 2: Sandra Salles
Email: sandra.nangadef@gmail.com
Abstract: The application of the term “modernism” as an analytical category to contexts of artistic creation outside the Euroamerican axis is still not consensual. Along these lines, the experiences of artistic modernities in Latin America have been suggesting new terminologies and analytical frameworks to think about the specificity of the art produced in the first half of the 20th century. Seeking to foster this dialogue, we are looking for papers that contextualize the scholarship on African modernisms, and that suggest approaches beyond the lenses and theoretical frameworks of the “modern discourse”, taking into account South-South circulation of ideas and artistic practices.
Seeking additional participants: YES
Title: Art of Stand-up Performance in Africa
Chair 1: Izuu Nwankwo
Email: ie.nwankwo@coou.edu.ng
Abstract: The term “stand-up comedy” may be recent and not of African origin, but the art of joke-telling itself is one of the oldest forms of entertainment in Africa. Several communities across the continent have different forms of satire and ridicule, some of which have found their way into contemporary stand-up art. These forms of indigenous performance within today’s stand-up comedy have been largely understudied. We therefore seek papers that address the visual aesthetics, performance mechanics, styles and perspectives of African stand-up artists especially with regard to humour generation as well as sustenance of laughter amidst myriad political difficulties in parts of Africa.
Seeking additional participants: YES
Title: CONTEMPORARY ART OF NIGERIA IN RETROSPECTIVE INSIGHT TO THE SOCIETY.
Chair 1: Afam Augustine Okwudili
Email: afampotman@gmail.com
Chair 2: NATHANIEL OGUNYALE
Email: natoskiyo@gmail.com
Abstract: Art in Nigeria has grown and undergone different developmental stages up to the present date ranging from its genesis – the start of contemporary art – in Ibadan at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology (NCAST) in 1953/54, to Zaira with the establishment of the School of Higher Learning in Art which gave birth to many famous artists in Nigeria in different areas of fine and applied art. This has made a significant impression on Nigerian society at large in term of record keeping and documentation. This paper x-rays the beginning of what is known as Contemporary art, looking at art produced six or seven decades back as a form of documentation of the contemporary.
Seeking additional participants: NO
Title: Lagos Art World in the 21st Century
Chair 1: Tobenna Okwuosa
Email: descrollstudio@gmail.com
Abstract: Since the beginning of the century, the Lagos art world has recorded significant developments in its art system, such as the establishment of auction houses, spaces and centers for contemporary art, art foundations, artists residency programs, national art competitions, a university museum, a biennial, and international art fairs and festivals. Artistic practices in installation art, performance, photography, sound art, and video art have received greater acceptance. There are also artists who are doing great things with conventional methods. The papers on this panel will show the recent developments and dynamics of the Lagos art world in the twenty-first century.
Seeking additional participants: YES
Title: The Art of Benin through the ages
Chair 1: Felix Osaigbovo
Email: osaigbovo.osaigbovo@gmail.com
Abstract: From the reign of the first Ogiso through the Obaship system of Eweka the First, to the present reign of Oba Ewuare the Second, the Benins have been at the centre of art and culture. Before the coming of the Europeans into Benin, the Benins have developed a specialised guild system that promoted their traditional arts, crafts and dances. The purpose of this panel is to showcase the rich artistic and cultural heritage of Benin through the ages as exemplified through their dresse, dance, craft and artworks and the….
Seeking additional participants: NO
Title: The African Nation: South Africa and Transnational Cultural Production
Chair 1: Adedamola Osinulu
Email: damolite@gmail.com
Abstract: South Africa and its cities are the site of a three-decade experiment in the transnational exchange of people and ideas between that country and its counterparts in sub-Saharan Africa. This panel seeks to highlight the work of cultural producers on the forefront of that exchange and to explore the ways in which South Africa (because of its particular history, geography, infrastructure, legal structure and economy) facilitates their work. We are interested in moving beyond recent anti-immigrant violence (without avoiding this) to discover how these artists are forging new paths to a common African identity and suturing wounds, old and new.
Seeking additional participants: YES
Title: Ceramics on Display: Museum Presences and Practices
Chair 1: Elizabeth Perrill
Email: eaperril@uncg.edu
Abstract: The inclusion of ceramics is a must for any museum focused on the arts of Africa. However, an institution’s mission statement and orientation toward ethnographic, anthropological, or art historical methodologies can dramatically shift the treatment of the ceramic medium. This panel focuses on the recent trends and trajectories in the incorporation of and methodology surrounding ceramics in museum practice. Contributors with experience in the practice of museum design, African curation, or ceramics scholarship that touches upon display and collecting are encouraged. Scholarship on historical practices and contemporary trends are equally encouraged.
Seeking additional participants: YES
Title: Interdisciplinary Communication in Art/Design History, Archaeology and Anthropology
Chair 1: Donna Pido
Email: pido@africaonline.co.ke
Abstract: Each academic and professional discipline sets its own definitions, paradigms, parameters and epistemological boundaries. In spite of considerable overlap and often congruence in our subject matter and intellectual objectives, we often fall short of appropriate communication. Much as we appreciate and benefit from one another’s work, efforts at fruitful cross disciplinary interaction can be frustrating. Papers are invited that describe and document this situation and discuss/propose solutions that can call attention to the complex set of problems.
Seeking additional participants: YES
Title: What’s Left? African Art and Anthropology
Chair 1: Peter Probst
Email: peter.probst@tufts.edu
Abstract: Anthropology once played a decisive role in African art studies. Not any longer. Challenged by waves of post- and decolonial turns, anthropological interventions in the Africanist art world have become rare. At least, so it seems. But has anthropology really abandoned the field? Recent collaborative projects of anthropologists with artists (De Boeck & Bolaji 2016) and curators (Fillitz & Nzewi, 2020) apparently speak to anthropology’s continuous presence in the field. Given this ambivalent finding, the panel aims to evaluate and discuss anthropology’s role and relevance in the field today. What is it, the discipline can (still) bring to the table?
Seeking additional participants: Yes
Title: The Futures of African Fashion
Chair 1: Christopher Richards
Email: c.richards66@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Abstract: Now firmly established as integral to the African art historical canon, African fashion continues to captivate scholars and artists alike, resulting in new modes for considering this malleable and meaningful form of artistic expression. This panel aims to explore recent developments in the field of African fashion, with a particular focus on innovative approaches to the art of dressing the body. Inclusive of recent exhibitions and forthcoming scholarship, the papers aim to illustrate how fashion and dress can be used to more directly engage the public, nuance existing scholarship, and better understand African identities in a post-colonial context.
Seeking additional participants: Yes
Title: Narrating public and private histories through artworks in (or involving) cloth
Chair 1: Brenda Schmahmann
Email: brendas@uj.ac.za
Chair 2: Irene Bronner
Email: ireneb@uj.ac.za
Abstract: African artists and those of the African diaspora have used textiles (or weaving, or embroidery, collage, printing and other techniques to work into cloth) to represent events or histories with public or personal significance. Presenters are asked to consider how techniques of working into or with fabric have contributed to the meanings of examples selected for focus. Examples identified may be by individual artists or produced through collaboration. They may be works designed to be hung, ones where fabric has assumed sculptural form or works that involve performance. They may be recent or historical.
Seeking additional participants: Yes
Title: Contemporary African Arts and Theory
Chair 1: Fiona Siegenthaler
Email: Fiona.Siegenthaler@unibas.ch
Abstract: Postcolonial and decolonial theories have deconstructed Eurocentric perceptions and receptions of ‘African art’, questioned the Western canon and thus contributed to the decolonial project in the field of aesthetics. However, embracing a globalized approach informed by international intellectual discourses and art circuits, the scholarship on ‘contemporary’ art risks to perpetuate Western aesthetics and epistemologies as central reference point. What role does art theory have in the contemporary call for decolonial aesthetics? What contribution can the notion of ‘contemporary African art theory’ (as theory about ‘African art’, but also as ‘African theory’ of art) make to contemporary art theory more generally?
Seeking additional participants: Yes
Title: In Remembrance of Polly Roberts: New Research on the Arts of Africa
Chair 1: Elaine Sullivan
Email: elaine.e.sullivan@gmail.com
Abstract: This panel is organized by students and friends of Professor Mary (Polly) Nooter Roberts. From early exhibitions at the Center for African Art to work at the Fowler Museum at UCLA and most recently at LACMA, Polly’s exhibitions reconsidered how to present arts and knowledge from Africa. Her extensive writings on secrecy, memory, power, object biographies, and modes of display demonstrated deep, respectful work on underlying concepts of African art history. The speakers, spanning several academic generations and working in both museums and academia, will engage with these topics while moving conversations forward with examples from across Africa.
Seeking additional participants: Yes
Title: Fugitive Spiritualities: Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic, Session Two
Chair 1: Alexandra Thomas
Email: alexandra.m.thomas@yale.edu
Chair 2: Angie Epifano
Email: angie.epifano@yale.edu
Abstract: Session Two of “Fugitive Spiritualties” offers four papers by established professionals that will work in concert with the presentations given in Session One. This panel emerges from a commitment to explore aesthetic expressions and representations of fugitivity as a black Atlantic religious practice. Papers will creatively consider the fugitive as a methodological concept that works in tandem with a queer theoretical approach. We hope that these two panels will assemble a diverse range of scholars whose work seeks to define a queer black Atlantic, while deliberating the application of queer theory to African Art History today.
Seeking additional participants: Yes
Title: SOUNDING THE URBAN CITIES: LAGOS AND IBADAN SPACES IN NIGERIA
Chair 1: Olusegun Titus
Email: ostitus@oauife.edu.ng
Chair 2: Leke Olayinka
Email: toluchoir@gmail.com
Abstract: The panel theme focuses on the musical and artistic narratives of the urban, its landscape, built environment, and day to day struggles among most of the city dwellers who live in slums and ghettos. We also examine the environmental pollutions in forms of air and solid wastes and their health challenges. The panel comprising four presenters from the Department of Music, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, are specialists in the areas of music and climate change, environmental degradation, migration and urban narratives
Seeking additional participants: YES
Title: Senegal’s 60th: Six Decades of Art Worlding
Chair 1: Joseph Underwood
Email: JLUnderwood12@Gmail.com
Abstract: Senegal became fully independent on June 20, 1960—its 60th anniversary will occur during the Triennial. Joanna Grabski observed how Dakar is a city where “individuals and institutions intersect with other urban sites and global art platforms… especially through exhibitions.” From the 1966 First World Festival of Negro Art, through the globally-itinerant Contemporary Art of Senegal (1974-1984), and up to Dak’Art Biennale2020, this nation indelibly shapes definitions of African art through exhibitions that resonate at local, regional, and international registers. This panel invites reflection on exhibitions, known or overlooked, that acknowledge Senegal’s global legacy at this moment in its history.
Seeking additional participants: Yes
Title: “London is a suburb of Johannesburg”: re-orienting worlds, re-asserting Africa
Chair 1: Liese Van Der Watt
Email: liesevanderwatt@gmail.com
Chair 2: Michael Godby
Email: mapgodby@gmail.com
Abstract: This panel will consider how art from African perspectives interrogates ‘official’ accounts of history – African and global- in order to re-orient world-views. For the purposes of this panel, we are less interested in the Other coming “home” as Homi Bhabha referred to the influx of postwar immigrants and refugees into Western centres, but rather in the affirmation of Africa as a centre. The difference is crucial: in outlining these parameters we are soliciting papers on art and curatorial practices that put Africa at the centre and in the process provincialise its others.
Seeking additional participants: Yes
Title: African Women/African Modernism: New Art Historical Research on Twentieth Century Women Artists
Chair 1: Monica Blackmun Visona
Email: m.b.visona@uky.edu
Abstract: This panel solicits studies based on archival and fieldwork research, as well as inviting practicing artists to reflect on their own experiences as African women and as twentieth-century modernists. With a few notable exceptions, few art historical studies assess the careers of women working as modern artists in the nations of twentieth-century Africa. New research that highlights the contributions of African women artists may provide more nuanced insights into the challenges they faced in the recent past, while highlighting issues that continue to confront African women working in contemporary art markets.
Seeking additional participants: Yes
Roundtables
Title: Apothecary for the Postcolonial Condition
Chair 1: Candice Allison
Email: candice.allison@outlook.com
Chair 2: Fadzai Muchemwa
Email: muchemwa.fadzai@gmail.com
Abstract: Is post-colonialism the antidote to colonialism? Are former colonies now struggling with the post-colonial condition – with symptoms ranging from identity, social and political disorders, to anxiety, depression, and violent outbursts? How do we diagnose and treat these post-colonial stress disorders? What treatments are available and most effective – spiritual, herbal, Western medicine, therapy, exercise, exorcism? The Apothecary is a subversive and satirical intervention initiated by Practice Theory Collective for the recuperation of after-colonial subjects, manifesting in this first iteration as a round table discussion bringing together artists and cultural practitioners to discuss the role of art in after-colonial societies.
Seeking additional participants: No
Title: Disrupting the canon/creating the canon: African art in the 20th and 21st centuries
Chair 1: Jean Borgatti
Email: jborgatti@gmail.com
Abstract: Disrupting the canon/creating the canon: African art in the 20th and 21st centuries, a roundtable intended to discuss the problematic ‘fit’ of African art history into a global art history still largely defined by the Western canon. It follows a set of sessions on this topic that were part of ASA 2019 and that motivated a range of responses both theoretical and based on case studies of artists and artworks by African and Diaspora artists. These artists are reconfiguring historic forms to meet changing cultural norms in Africa to be considered gallery-focused works of art aimed at an international audience.
Seeking additional participants: Yes
Title: Arts and the Senses in Africa and its Diasporas
Chair 1: Henry Drewal
Email: hjdrewal@wisc.edu
Abstract: The field of sensory studies has expanded greatly over the last three decades and opened our body-minds to the sense-abilities of artists and audiences, and deeper, more expansive and nuanced understandings of the arts, their histories and cultural contexts, whether in Africa or beyond. It was my own apprenticeships with Yoruba sculptors that led to my theory/method called Sensiotics. This panel invites presenters to share their own work on the multi-sensorial aspects of African and African Diaspora arts and offer critiques of and/or suggestions for the refinement of this approach. 90-minutes of six 10-minute summaries plus 30 minutes discussion.
Seeking additional participants: Yes
Title: A CASE FOR THE FIRST CONGOLESE CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM?
Chair 1: Myoto Liyolo
Email: mliyolo@fondationliyolo.org
Abstract: On April 1st 2019, famous Congolese sculptor and Professor Alfred Liyolo passed away, in Vienna, Austria. The Fondation Liyolo has been set up to preserve his artistic legacy. The first private Congolese contemporary art museum will rise from his property. A cultural center and an-artist in residence program will be set up to promote cultural exchanges, all in line with Liyolo’s vision. In 2014, it earned him from the Chinese Minister of Culture, the Prize for the Contribution to Cultural Exchanges. A prize seldom bestowed to Africans. Is there a case for the first private contemporary museum for the DRC?
Seeking additional participants: Yes
Title: The black woman : An exploration of women as space
Chair 1: Zinziswa Mavuso
Email: mavuszz@unisa.ac.za
Chair 2: Duduzile Mathebula
Email: mathed1@unisa.ac.za
Abstract: The Black woman’s body has become more visible within [the] South African visual arts context. This is due to the hypervisualisation of it [Black women’s bodies] in the name of inclusivity and representation. Ironically the [this] hypervisibility of the body has come at the expense of the Black women’s voice.
The same or similar narratives and voices take the centre stage often erasing other emerging voices. Yet against the current wave of the normative narrative on Black women new voices are emerging. Moments of forceful silences are disrupting the status quo and claiming space, claiming visibility and claiming an audible voice.
Seeking additional participants: No
Title: THE UNSUNG FEMALE ARTISTS CHRONICLE WEAVERS OF BENIN KINGDOM
Chair 1: Michael Omoighe
Email: mikeck27@hotmail.com
Chair 2: Stella Mofunanya
Email: ifyawoh@yahoo.com
Abstract: The African tradition recognizes the shared roles engaged in by female and male folks/genders in every community. However, due to the overwhelming influence of the male folks economically, and as well as their political power, the women are often relegated to the background. These unsung women sourced local vegetal materials for dye extracts, compounded clay and oxides for pottery and fibre materials for weaving. Any wonder then why that the artistic contributing roles of women to the overall development of the Benin kingdom are yet to be favorably documented in history books?
Seeking additional participants: No
Title: The Peace Corps and African Art
Chair 1: Raymond Silverman
Email: silveray@umich.edu
Abstract: Many of the pioneers in the field of African art were former Peace Corps (PC) volunteers, and it has long been assumed that their collective experiences in Africa played a role in shaping how African art has been studied, exhibited and collected over the last fifty years. But did they? This roundtable explores a set of fundamental questions: What was it about the PC experience that led these individuals to study African art? How did the PC experience inform their engagement with African art? And from a broader perspective, did the PC play a role in shaping the burgeoning field of African art?
Seeking additional participants: Yes, for the second session
Title: Revisiting Appropriations of Black Cultures
Chair 1: Karina Simonson
Email: karina_simonson@yahoo.co.uk
Chair 2: Hiroko Tsuchimoto
Email: hirokotsuchimoto@gmail.com
Abstract: The proposed roundtable addresses the issues of appropriation of black cultures as it emerges in the regions which historically didn’t have significant and visible black communities, such as the Baltics, East Asia, or other regions. This appropriation is closely connected to the perception of race and colonial history of the specific location. Nonetheless, the regions that don’t have tight historical connections with African cultures, can still have a deep-rooted tradition of cultural appropriations. By looking at various aspects of cultural appropriation in underrepresented countries we both criticize the Eurocentric perspective and seek to deconstruct the usual binaries of Black and White.
Seeking additional participants: Yes
Title: The Arts of Islam in Africa: A Multidisciplinary Initiative
Chair 1: Mark DeLancey
Email: mark.delancey@depaul.edu
Abstract: This roundtable will explore the diverse issues and methodological approaches employed by various disciplines in studying the impact of Islam on the arts of Africa.
Seeking additional participants: No