Director’s Talk: Babacar MBow
Beyond Unicentric Discourse: African and African Diaspora Art
Saturday, January 24, 7PM
Classifications of African and African Diaspora visual expressions as art or craft, “primitive” or sophisticated, intuitive or intellectual have much to do with western perceptions—a by-product of the colonial project. These contradictions and questions are important to our understanding of how the arts of Africa and the African Diaspora are seen. Label captions, wall texts, layout and other material factors that characterize the way in which the art is exhibited can sometimes maintain generalizations that frame both popular and scholarly approaches. This lecture sketches a pathway linking both African and African Diaspora art.