Black Portraiture[s] VIII: Enduring Blackness: A Decade of Black Portraitures
Date: May 29th – 30th 2023 (Monday – Tuesday)
Location: NYU PARIS, 57 Bd Saint-Germain (May 29th) & musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, 37 Quai Jacques Chirac (May 30th)
A congregation of artists, filmmakers, writers, and scholars will return to Paris to mark the tenth anniversary of “Black Portraiture[s]: Imaging the Black Body in the West” in locations that gave birth to this cultural phenomenon. From its origins at Harvard University in 2004, the conference took on its current name when it convened at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in 2013. It attracted more than 400 people and spread to other places, including the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the University of Paris Diderot (Paris 7).
The 2023 anniversary event will continue to reflect on the audacity of memory, imagination and aspiration, with which cultural producers have inscribed African and Diaspora African cultural bodies, politics, and styles in Europe and throughout the worlds they touched. Black Portraiture[s] – revisited in Paris – will meditate on the endurance of blackness amid a perilous present shaped by controversies over migration and nativism.
The anniversary event of Enduring Blackness will examine the historicity and rich panoply of black imagery and their articulations in important aesthetic conventions within European and global art forms. It will also trace the resounding resonance of the African diaspora in performative, literary, and academic media – from film, music and opera to sculpture, scholarship, painting, and photography, to architecture, textile arts, and fashion – like these modes of expression are committed to various audiences and commons. Additionally, it will examine the history and politics of black artistic and curatorial advocacy. Through broad conversations about the black body (and body politic) imagery in the West and around the world, the tenth anniversary of Black Portraiture[s] promises to continue its legacy of innovation in the fields of art, African studies, history, and critical culture.
Sponsors:
Musée Du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, NYU Paris, NYU Office of Global Inclusion, Diversity, and Strategic Innovation, NYU Office of the Provost, NYU Tisch Office of the Dean, NYU Tisch Department of Photography and Imaging, The Center for Black Visual Culture at The Institute of African American Affairs, NYU Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, Arts and Humanities, NYU Abu Dhabi, NYU Center for the Humanities, Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music/NYU, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research/ Harvard University, Wesleyan University, Hawthornden Foundation, The Gordon Parks Foundation, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University, Alain Locke Institute, UC Santa Barbara, Cornell University, Spelman College, Little Africa, Paris.
Panels (Monday, May 23rd)
Black Film
1:00 pm – 2:15 pm
Panelists:
Mara Brock Akil, Akissi Britton, Zola Mashariki, Michaela Angela Davis, J. Kevin Swain
Moderator(s):
Joan Morgan
Politics of Pleasure
2:30 pm – 3:45 pm
Panelists:
Brittney Cooper, Kaila Story, Uri McMillan, Treva Lindsey
Moderator(s):
Joan Morgan
Roundtable: The Myth: Black Women Unflattened
4:00 pm – 5:15 pm
Panelists:
Paula Giddings, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Evelynn Hammonds, Tayari Jones, Francille Rusan Wilson, Michelle Lanier
Moderator(s):
Lisa Coleman
Presentations and Screenings
5:15 pm – 6:45 pm
SCREENING: Nobody Dies: Women Family & Love in the film Alma’s Rainbow Ayoka Chenzira (5:15 – 5:30)
Clips from Masquerading, kutas, goobers and food operas Rachel Watanabe-Batton (5:30 – 5:45)
SCREENING: Où sont les Noirs? Rokhaya Diallo (5:45 – 6:45)
Moderator(s):
Alessandra Di Maio
Panels (Tuesday, May 24th)
Keynote
9:45 am – 10:30 pm
Keynote:
Raphaël Barontini and Amy Sherald
Moderator(s):
Moderated by Cheryl Finley with an introduction by Mariane Ibrahim
Being/Becoming: The Act of Portraiture
10:45 am – 12:00 pm
Panelists:
Nicole Fleetwood, Michael Gillespie, Denise Murrell, Jacqueline Stewart, Rhea Combs, Fatima Tobing Rony
Moderator(s):
Ernest Wilson III
Writers From the Diaspora
10:45 am – 12:00 pm
Panelists:
Kaiama L. Glover, Canisia Lubrin, Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse
Moderator(s):
Maaza Mengiste
Contemporary Voices
12:15 pm – 1:30 pm
Panelists:
Kambui Olujimi, Alexis Peskine, Alberta Whittle, Fahamu Pecou, Elizabeth Colomba, Adama Delphine Fawundu
Moderator(s):
Hank Willis Thomas
The Black Paris Archive: Interrogating Colonialist Visual Culture in Public Space
12:15 pm – 1:30 pm
Panelists:
Christine Barthe and Annabelle Lacour, Kimberly Juanita Brown, Jean-Paul Colleyn, Trica Keaton, Françoise Vergès
Moderator(s):
Gunja Sengupta
Le Grand Duc: Charleston, Chitlins, and Champagne
2:15 pm – 3:30 pm
Panelists:
Jeffrey C. Stewart, Salamishah Tillet, Myisha Priest, Terri Francis
Moderator(s):
Michael Dinwiddie
Black Curators Matter
3:45 pm – 5:00 pm
Panelists:
Sandrine Colard, Rujeko Hockley, Anne Lafont, Simon Njami, Kellie Jones
Moderator(s):
Kalia Brooks
Black Paris
5:15 pm – 6:30 pm
Panelists:
Tiffany Gill, Jake Lamar, Farah Jasmine Griffin and Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, Robert G. O’Meally, Audrey Edwards
Moderator(s):
Pamela Newkirk