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Art History Symposium

Art History Symposium 2010 (Feb. 26-27)

The Savannah College of Art and Design's art history department announces its third biennial symposium, Africa on My Mind: Contemporary Art, Home and Abroad, Feb. 26-27, 2010, in Savannah. The goal of the symposium is to encourage representation by a variety of media and scholarship regarding cultural and geographical areas in Africa and the African Diaspora.

Independent curator and internationally renowned art critic Simon Njami will deliver the keynote address Friday, Feb. 26, 7 p.m., at SCAD's Arnold Hall, 1810 Bull St. Njami also is a lecturer, novelist and essayist. He has served as artistic director of the Bamako (Mali) Photography Biennale since 2001, and he was co-curator of the first African pavilion at the 52nd Venice (Italy) Biennale in 2007. He also has curated numerous exhibitions of African art and photography, including "Africa Remix" and the first African Art Fair, held in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2008. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Simon Njami Bio

Simon Njami is a Paris-based independent curator, lecturer and art critic. Njami was the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Revue Noire, a journal of contemporary African and extra-occidental art. He has served as artistic director of the Bamako photography biennale from 2001-2008, and he co-curated the first African pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. Njami has curated numerous exhibitions of African art and photography, including Africa Remix (2004/2007) and the first African Art Fair, held in Johannesburg in 2008. Currently Njami serves as adviser of the Sindika Dokolo Collection, and he is consultant in visual arts for the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs cultural branch (Cultures France).

Simon Njami Abstract: A Matter of Gaze

It is commonly said that the entrance of African contemporary art into the general debate on art started with Jean-Hubert Martin’s exhibition Les Magiciens de la Terre (1989). I am not going to discuss this, even if, in the mid-1980s, some shows curated by myself (Ethnicolor, 1987) or David Elliott took place before. It doesn’t really matter if Martin’s show was not focusing on Africa, but was dealing the world.

What I am interested in are the mechanisms of it. It is trendy to call nowadays the recognition of African artists in the western market. I shall question that notion of recognition in the light of what really happened then. For a very long time, the gaze of ethnologists and anthropologists objectified Africa and the Africans. What they were producing was not integrated to the domain of art, but to that of tribal history.

A crucial publication like Sally Price’s Primitive Art in Civilized Places raised the issue of the legitimacy of certain perceptions about Africa. From the early 1990s, a new generation of art historians started to tackle the issue of African creation, but, more important, Africans started to reflect on those issues from an endogenous vantage point. The Dakar Biennale and later the Bamako Biennale were conceived in order to give an alternative to African contemporary artists.

Post-colonialism and post-modernity became the main tools of analysis, for the better of the worse, trapping the African artist in a political contradiction. Since Les Magiciens de la Terre, a number a major shows have been conceived that were focusing exclusively on Africa. I shall reflect on the political and intellectual context that gave them birth, from the Africa 95 season in London in 1995, to the first and maybe last African Pavilion in Venice in 2007.

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SCAD students, as well as art history and architectural history faculty members, should e-mail hkochend@scad.edu to register.

Contact

For more information, e-mail Art History Symposium.

Jane Rehl, Ph.D., and Andrew Nedd, Ph.D.
Symposium co-chairs, department of art history
Laurie Ann Farrell
Symposium adviser, executive director of SCAD Exhibitions

Preliminary schedule of events

All sessions will take place at Arnold Hall.

Friday, Feb. 26

Session I: Interstitial Africa
9-10:30 a.m.
Presenters:
   •   Marie Lortie, University of Toronto
   •   Lucy Gallun, Graduate Center, City University of New York
   •   Sidney Kasfir, Emory University

Chairs:
   •   Edwin Johnson, art history, SCAD
   •   John Peffer, Ramapo College of New Jersey

Session II: Academics, Markets and Imaginaries: African Art in Globalized Aesthetic Flows
10:45 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Presenters:
   •   Victoria Rovine, University of Florida
   •    Kevin Melhearn, City University of New York
   •   Joshua Cohen, Columbia University

Chairs:
   •   Susan Falls, liberal arts (anthropology)
   •   Désiré Hounguès, liberal arts (anthropology)

Session III: Loss, Hybridity and Resurrection
1:30-2:45 p.m.
Presenters:
   •   Jessica Gerschultz, Emory University
   •   Kim Miller, Wheaton College
   •   Denise Murrell, Columbia University

Chairs:
   •   Rihab Bagnole, art history, SCAD
   •   Alexandria Pierce, art history, SCAD

Session IV: On Display: Contemporary African Art
3-4:30 p.m.
Presenters:
   •   Kinsey Katchka, North Carolina Museum of Art
   •   Elvira Dyangani Ose, Cornell University
   •    Allison Moore, art history, SCAD

Chairs:
   •   Allison Moore, art history, SCAD
   •   Laurie Ann Farrell, executive director of SCAD Exhibitions

Keynote Speaker: Simon Njami
7-8:15 p.m.

Gallery reception
8:30-10 p.m.

Saturday, Feb. 27

Session V: Just Passing Through: Confronting Spatial Theory and Subjectivity
9-10:30 a.m.
Presenters:
   •   Giulia Paoletti, Columbia University
   •   Amy Powell, University of Wisconsin, Madison
   •   Carol Magee, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Chairs:
   •   Fred Gross, art history, SCAD
   •   Lisa Jaye Young, art history, SCAD

Session VI: Artists' Panel
10:45 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Presenters to be announced.
Chairs:
   •   Laurie Ann Farrell, executive director of SCAD exhibitions
   •   Christoph Klütsch, art history, SCAD

Farewell
12:15 p.m.

Presenters

Joshua Cohen

Joshua Cohen is an art history Ph.D. student at Columbia University specializing in African and 20th-century European art. His areas of interest include creative exchanges between Africa and Europe, anti-colonial and independence movements, nationalization of tradition, masquerade, music, performance and museum studies.

Lucy Becroft Gallun

Lucy Becroft Gallun is the Whitney Lauder Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania. Last year, she was a Helena Rubenstein Curatorial Fellow in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. From 2005-09, she served as associate publisher at Gregory R. Miller & Co., an imprint specializing in books about contemporary art and artists. She has also taught in the art history and architecture departments of Hunter College and City College of the City University of New York.

Jessica Gerschultz

Jessica Gerschultz is a Ph.D. candidate in African art history at Emory University. Her dissertation, “Weaving the National Identity: The Tapestries of Safia Farhat,” analyzes the monumental tapestries produced by Farhat, an elite woman artist, for the Tunisian Ministry of Culture in the post-Independence period. Gerschultz is interested in how these works of art provide a framework for studying interwoven notions of cultural heritage, women’s changing social roles, and the formation of a new national identity. She currently is based in Tunis, where she is researching and studying Arabic on a Fulbright fellowship. In addition, she recently wrote an article on the vitality of the workshop system in Nairobi, where she conducted field research while working on a project at the Rahimtulla Museum of Modern Art in 2003.

Sidney Kasfir

Sidney Kasfir is professor of African art history and director of the African studies program at Emory University. She is the author of “Contemporary African Art” and “African Art and the Colonial Encounter” and coeditor with Till Forster of “Rethinking the Workshop: Work and Agency in African Art” (forthcoming). She has conducted research in Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda on both pre-colonial and contemporary art and is currently co-curating a major exhibition of arts of the Benue Valley, Nigeria, scheduled to open in 2011.

Kinsey Katchka

Kinsey Katchka holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Indiana University and is associate curator of modern and contemporary art at the North Carolina Museum of Art. Her research focuses on contemporary African expressive culture and the history of exhibition practice, as well as globalization and cultural policy. In her curatorial work and exhibitions, she specializes in the contemporary arts of Africa, the African diaspora and the Muslim world, although her projects take a global approach and address all regions. She curated the NCMA exhibition “Far from Home” (2008), featuring artists from throughout the world whose work addresses issues of mobility and relocation. Katchka also curated the traveling exhibition “Julie Mehretu: City Sitings” (2007-2008), highlighting the work of the internationally acclaimed Ethiopian-American artist, and of the upcoming exhibition “Lalla Essaydi: Revisions” (2011).

Marie Lortie

Marie Lortie is a Ph.D. student in art history at the University of Toronto. In 2008, she graduated with a master’s degree from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Her thesis discussed the Bamako Biennial of African photography.

Carol Magee

Carol Magee is assistant professor of art history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she teaches African visual culture. Her research takes two directions. The first investigates the ways in which Americans come to understand African arts and cultures through their own cultural products, such as museum exhibitions and popular culture (the subject of her book project, “Africa in the American Imagination: popular culture, racialized identities, and African art”). The second looks at contemporary African photography that engages with ideas of place and space. She has published in Third Text, Social Identities, African Arts and Africa Today.

Kevin Melhearn

Kevin Mulhearn is currently completing his dissertation under the supervision of Geoffrey Batchen at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Entitled “Critical Positions in Recent South African Photography, 1967-2009,” the work considers several South African photographers, addressing their political commitments and their beliefs about the efficacy of art as an agent of social change. He has published artists’ biographies and compiled an extensive bibliography on African photography for the Okwui Enwezor edited exhibition catalogue Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography and supplied entries to the Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography. He currently teaches as an adjunct professor at University of South Carolina Upstate, Converse College and Wofford College.

Kim Miller

Kim Miller is assistant professor of art history and women's studies at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, where she also coordinates the women's studies program. Her research concerns the relationship between visual culture, gender and power, including the ways in which women use art as a form of activism and empowerment. Her current research project examines visual representations of women political activists in South Africa both during and after the struggle against apartheid. Specifically, the project examines the extent to which women's participation in the struggle for democracy is represented and remembered, and in many cases forgotten, in contemporary South African visual culture and commemorative sites.

Allison Moore

Allison Moore teaches in the art history department at SCAD. She has written about contemporary African art and photography for publications such as Artforum and History of Photography, and she also worked on the exhibition "Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography" at the International Center of Photography in New York. She is currently working on a book manuscript about the contemporary art photography movement in Bamako, Mali.

Denise Murrell

Denise Murrell is a Ph.D. student in art history at Columbia University in New York, with research interests in global contemporary art, the art of the African diaspora and 19th-century Western art. Since 2005, she has been a contract lecturer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she has developed a series of public gallery talks on African, modern and contemporary art. She is also a contributing writer for the Met’s Timeline of Art History. Murrell has had extensive civic experience with museum support groups and with arts policy related to arts education in the public schools.

Elvira Dyangani Ose

Elvira Dyangani Ose is pursuing a Ph.D. in the history of art and visual studies at Cornell University, New York, and she holds a master’s diploma in theory and history of architecture and a B.A. in the history of art. She is founding member of the Laboratory for Oral Resources of Equatorial Guinea and of the research group Afroeuropeans at the University of León, Spain. Her academic and curatorial research focuses on contemporary African art and culture. As an independent curator, she has developed a variety of interdisciplinary projects focusing on the recovery of collective memory, intervention in public space and urban ethnography. She has worked as a curator at the CAAC (Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo) in Sevilla and at the CAAM (Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno) in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. She is general curator of Arte inVisible, AECID (Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo) in its 2009 and 2010 editions.

Giulia Paoletti

Giulia Paoletti is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of art history and archaeology at Columbia University, New York. She completed her bachelor’s degree in art history at Sussex University (Brighton, U.K.) and her master at SOAS (London, U.K.). With a concentration on contemporary African art, she is interested in photography as a medium that can complicate notions of modernity and urbanism in West Africa. Recently, she collaborated with lettera27 Foundation on the project WikiAfrica and with the art centre doual’art and iStrike Foundation for the 2007 Salon Urbain de Douala (Cameroon). She has written reviews for journals including African Arts, Africa e Mediterraneo and diARTgonale.

Amy L. Powell

Amy L. Powell is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of art history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she also earned her M.A. Her research focuses on contemporary art from Africa, Europe and the United States; postcolonial theory; contemporary theories of representation; transnational feminism and African cinema. Her dissertation examines transnational contemporary art that uses temporality as a set of critical strategies for interrogating issues of subjectivity, representation and spectatorship. Her essay "Phantom Projections, Creolized Cinema: Time-Images in Isaac Julien's Fantôme Afrique" appeared in the 2009 issue of the Chicago Art Journal.

Victoria Rovine

Victoria Rovine is an associate professor of art history and African studies at the University of Florida. She has conducted extensive research in Mali, where she explored the revival of traditional textiles as part of the contemporary art and fashion scenes there. Her book on the subject, “Bogolan: Shaping Culture through Cloth in Contemporary Mali,” was published by Smithsonian Institution Press in 2001 and republished with a new preface in 2008 by Indiana University Press. She has also published numerous book chapters and articles on African fashion design, textiles and contemporary arts. Her current research concerns African fashion designers in global markets and African influences on Western fashion design.

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Events

Adam Kuehl exhibition: "Past Within the Present: Images of Richard Arnold Hall"
Nov. 07, 2011 - Nov. 07, 2012
"Town & Country: Jewelry from the Natural and Synthetic Worlds"
April 06, 2012 - June 03, 2012

News

April 06, 2012
Attend Louis Menand lecture about Andy Warhol
Jan. 25, 2012
Professor awarded "Best in Show" prize
Dec. 19, 2011
Attend winter 'Art of the Mind' lectures
Dec. 06, 2011
SCAD announces SECAC 2011, Text + Texture

Recognition

Hallinan seeking degree in museum professions
Margaret Hallinan (B.F.A., art history, 2011) is seeking an M.A. in museum professions at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey. She graduated summa cum laude from SCAD and completed her thesis "The Tumi Knives of Ancient Peru" with professors Jane Rehl and Edwin Johnson. As a part of her curriculum minor in museum studies, she interned with the curator of collections at the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Amy Guess presents research at conference
M.A. art history student Amy Guess will present her research, "Rivalry, Envy and Self-Relation: Caravaggio as the Second Michelangelo," at Rivalry in the Arts: The Inaugural International Conference in Paragone Studies hosted by the Flint Institute of Arts in Flint, Michigan. Guess is completing her M.A. thesis on the artist's work.
Shimohirao works at Galeria Nara Roesler
Lilian Shimohirao (B.F.A., art history, 2008) completed her graduate program with distinction at Goldsmiths, University of London. At SCAD she earned summa cum laude recognition and completed her thesis, "Making the Invisible Visible: A Reading of Vik Muniz's The Invisible Object/Archeology of Desire," with professors Christoph Kluetsch and Frederick Gross. Shimohirao is now working with the international art research and communications department at the Galeria Nara Roesler, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Margaret Hallinan to attend master's program
Margaret Hallinan (B.F.A., art history, 2011) will attend the master's program in museum professions at Seton Hall University. Hallinan graduated summa cum laude from SCAD and completed her thesis, "The Tumi Knives of Ancient Peru," with professors Jane Rehl and Edwin Johnson. As a part of her curriculum minor in museum studies, she interned with the curator of collections at the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Art History Symposium