African art programs @ Clark Art
This spring The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and the Williams College Museum of Art have organized a series of programs and exhibitions focusing on contemporary African art, diasporic art, and art history, designed to catalyze dialogue across academic disciplines for artists, scholars, students, and the general public.
Artistic Crossings of the Black Atlantic: The Migratory Aesthetic in Contemporary Art (Symposium)
Saturday, March 1, 2008
This symposium invites five acclaimed artists—multi-media artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, sculptor Willie Cole, British filmmaker Isaac Julien, photographer Hank Willis Thomas, and installation artist and MacArthur Fellow Fred Wilson—to discuss the Black Atlantic aesthetic. Through transatlantic connections among Africa, Britain, the Caribbean, and the United States, black intellectuals and literary figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Richard Wright fashioned a Black Atlantic culture that made a central contribution to the modernist aesthetic. Today this Black Atlantic aesthetic extends into the realm of the visual as international artists critically engage cross-Atlantic migration as a principal focus of their work. (Ticketed event: $20, $10 for members; students free)
Art History and Diaspora: Genealogies, Theories, Practices (Conference)
Friday, April 25-Saturday, April 26, 2008
This year's Clark Conference will bring together artists, curators, and art historians to investigate the impact of the field of diaspora studies on art historical scholarship. A primary focus will be on defining how diaspora—with its connotations of forced migration because of political expulsion, enslavement, shifting belief systems, war, and other forms of nationalist conflict—has shaped both art-making and art historical scholarship in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Speakers will include John P. Bowles, Hamid Naficy, Richard J. Powell, Nikos Papastergiadis, Kobena Mercer, Simon Njami, Pamela R. Franco, and Lubaina Himid. Co-convened by Mora Beauchamp-Byrd, Natasha Becker, and Ondine Chavoya.
Contemporary African Art: History, Theory and Practice: A Workshop
May 24, 2008
"Contemporary African Art: History, Theory, and Practice" is a workshop organized by the Research and Academic Program of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and the Wits School of the Arts at the University of Witwatersrand (WITS) in Johannesburg, South Africa. This project, undertaken with the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will examine more than forty years of art historical scholarship about modern and contemporary African art. The two components of the workshop, international gatherings of distinguished scholars and artists, will take place in 2007 and 2008. The initial phase of the Workshop [was] held at WITS (October 25–28, 2007), and the second phase will be held at the Clark in Williamstown, Massachusetts (May 22–25, 2008). This will be followed by a Getty-funded residency for African participants in Williamstown and New York City from May 25–30.
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