SYMPOSIUM: Interrogating African Modernity: Art, Cultural Politics, and Global Identities
Friday, May 4 / 9:00 AM
McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020
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The Interrogating African Modernity conference interrogates the history and critical reception of modern African art in art history and cultural studies. It posits the following fundamental questions: fundamental question: When was (or is) African modernity? What are its specific subject positions, and its discourses of visual and cultural representation? It subjects these issues to an interdisciplinary analysis to elicit new critical frameworks for interpreting modern African art's intersection with local and global discourses of modernity. The conference thus analyzes the invention of specific visual languages of African modernist expressions that evaluate how African artists engaged principal questions about the meanings of African culture within the matrix of modern art, and the meanings of their location as Africans/modern artists within nationalist and internationalist discourses of modernist expression. Through this focus, the conference examines changing conditions of modernist practice in African art and evaluates the ideologies of formal and conceptual representations that underpinned such changes.
For more information:www.mbanefofoundation.org/conference_agenda.htm
Sponsored by The Mbanefo Foundation, Department of History of Art and Architecture, the IHC, and the IHCís African Studies Research Focus Group
