For African American Art Lovers - Free Conference - April 16-18 @ Howard University - 20th ANNUAL JAMES A. PORTER COLLOQUIUM ON AFRICAN AMERICAN ART

[Ananda Kiamsha Madelyn Leeke]

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NOTE: Blog text copied from http://portercolloquium.org/colloquium/2009.


2009 Colloquium20th ANNUAL JAMES A. PORTER COLLOQUIUM ON AFRICAN AMERICAN ART

Honoring

Sharon Patton & Judith Wilson

Featuring

Salah Hassan, Cheryl Finley & Emma Amos

Armour J. Blackburn Center • Howard University • Washington DC


The 2009 Porter Colloquium presents new research, new interpretations, and new subjectivities that inform scholarly practice and promote fresh ways of thinking and writing about African American art and other art in the African Diaspora. This year’s theme, Trajectories provides a frame by which art historians, artists, critics, curators, collectors and interdisciplinary scholars, privilege topics, concepts, and issues that further tease out the complexities, the multiple levels of meaning, the subtleties, the contradictions in recent artistic production and art scholarship.

Over the past twenty years the Porter Colloquium has identified and marked doorways that art historians, curators, interdisciplinary scholars, and artists of future generations will see as texts, as sources for informing artistic production, art historiography, aesthetic discourse on African American art here in North America and throughout the African Diaspora.

The trajectories that are being explored in Porter Colloquium sessions this year include demographics, the movement of people and ideas over large parts of the world and particularly their immigration to the United States and to major art centers around the world. To be sure, the changes that have taken place over the past two decades need reexamination, particularly with respect to the changes in artistic productions and the exploration of concepts and ideas that have helped to change the artistic landscape.

Over the last three decades the production, the presentation, the reception of African American art has
expanded virtually exponentially. African American art, like the art of the contemporary world, has responded to modernist, to postmodernist issues and has reflected the changes in technologies, more extensive contact and collaboration across ethnic, cultural and continental boundaries.

This year we are pleased to honor the pioneering achievements of scholar Sharon Patton, former executive director, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and art historian Judith Wilson.

On behalf of the Department of Art, Division of Fine Arts, College of Arts and Sciences, and the Colloquium Executive Committee, we welcome you and your colleagues to this year’s 20th Annual James A. Porter Colloquium on African American Art.

The Porter Colloquium Session will benefit art historians, interdisciplinary scholars, artists, educators, collectors, students, museum professionals and the general public.

Admission to all sessions is free and open to the general public.