Black Portraiture[s]: Enduring Blackness
Date: June 17th, 2022
Location: Casa Artom, Venice, Italy
Black Portraitures’ Enduring Blackness was held on June 17, 2022 (with an opening dinner on June 16) in Venice, Italy, convened in connection with the 59th Venice Biennale. We co-hosted the symposium with Wake Forest University at their site, Casa Artom, in Venice. Enduring Blackness brought together artists, scholars, cultural critics and curators in a one-day symposium to discuss the African and Africa Diasporic presence in European art, literature, film, and art history. The enduring presence of Africa continues to be self-evident in global representations and cross referencing of Africa and Africanness have been foundational to European thought and aesthetics. They are easily evidenced in opera, sculptures, portraits in both painting and latter-day photography, dance and choreography, classical and contemporary music, architecture, fashion and textile arts. Panelists reckoned deeply with the audacity of past inscriptions of African bodies and styles in the European past and contemplated the ways in which recent migrations, cultivations and conjugations of African diasporic thoughts, styles and affects serve to mitigate a history of absences.
Sponsors: Mr. Robert Holmes, Esq., the Office of the Provost at Wake Forest University, Wake Forest – Casa Artom Campus, the Office of the Provost at New York University, the Office of the Dean – Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, the Department of Photography & Imaging at NYU, The Center for Black Visual Culture at The Institute of African American Affairs, the Office of Global Inclusion at NYU, NYU Abu Dhabi, the Hutchins Center for African American Research at Harvard, Cornell University, and Spelman College.
Welcome Remarks
9:00 am
Awam Ampka, Ellyn Toscano, Deborah Willis, Christina Soriano, Alessandra Von Burg, Lisa Coleman
SESSION 1
9:30 am – 12:00 pm
The first panel will explore the enduring presence and ideation of Africa continues to be self-evident in global representations, despite long-standing practices of historical exclusions, sanitizations and appropriations.
Panelists:
Pamela Newkirk, Ota Benga and the Reparation of History
Maaza Mengiste, But You Amaze Me
Cheryl Finley, Black Venice
Michelle Lanier, The Wind-Tide Woman Came Back: Harriet Jacobs, AfroCarolina, and Her Atlantic Worlds
Rosie Gordon-Wallace, InterSectionality: Art and Artists from the African Diaspora Art
Moderator(s):
Deborah Willis
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Panelists:
Michael Dinwiddie, Transformation! 100 Years of African American Theatre (1821-1921)
Nashormeh Lindo, When the Moors Descended on Venice in 1997
Roshini Kempadoo, Extraction Matters: Black, Gold, Dust
Gunja Sengupta, From “Eurasian” to “Prominent Negro”: An Afro-Asian Story from Gilded Age and Progressive Era America
Alessandra DiMaio, Transition @ 60: The Black in the Mediterranean Blue
SESSION 2
2:00 pm – 4:30 pm
This panel will provide critical context about how actors, scholars, cultural activists, writers, and artists from around the world tackle issues about representation and migration within an art forum.
Treva B. Lindsey, Envisioning Freedom: Black Women’s Imaginings of the Wholly Impossible
Tanisha Ford, Black Art Collecting and the Civil Rights Movement
John Curley, Hale Woodruff’s Africa and the Bull, ca. 1958
Romi Crawford, Visualizing the Black Pedagogical
Moderator(s): Joan Morgan
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Panelists:
Michael K. Wilson, (re)Memorializing the Caribbean in Public Space: Artistic Interventions that Challenge Who and How We Remember within the Colonial Imaginary
Tayari Jones, Ann Petry and the Revolutionary Power of Popular Fiction
Tanisha M. Jackson, Contemporary Black Women Artists Enduring Blackness as Wellness Workers
Tsedaye Makonnen, The Need for Black Refuge