16th ACASA Triennial Symposium on African Art Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) Hosted by Brooklyn Museum Brooklyn, New York SCHEDULE OF SESSIONS WITH ABSTRACTS Wednesday, March 19, 2014 (Museum Day) Opening Remarks (9:15 – 9:30) Session 1 (9:30 – 11:15 AM) 1.1 Mining the Series: Establishing Art Historical Contexts for African Art. Convener: Kathryn Wysocki Gunsch, Baltimore Museum of Art, [email protected] This panel will present recent scholarship that uses the concept of the “series” as a method for investigating individual artworks. The field has productively established the fragmentary nature of African art as it is displayed in Euro-American collections, but it is also useful to contextualize art objects within a series, whether defined by artist, period, patron, current collection, or object type. Comparisons within a series can provide new information that sharpens knowledge of individual artworks, artist’s careers, or the influence of patronage. Both “traditional” and “contemporary” art will be discussed. Presenters: Kota Quota: How Digital Tools Can Help Assess and Discover New Information Frederic Cloth Yale-van Rijn Archive [email protected] The Aku Queen Victoria Portrait Figures: Reassessing Krio/Saro (Euro- African) Material Culture Zachary Kingdon World Museum, Liverpool [email protected] Patterns of Authorship: Finding Series within the Benin Bronze Plaque Corpus Kathryn Wysocki Gunsch Sorting Benin’s Neglected Bronze “Loop Figures” Barbara Blackmun San Diego Mesa College (Emerita) [email protected] Session 2 (11:30 – 1:30 PM) 2.1 ROUNDTABLE: New Directions in the Display and Interpretation of African Art. Convener: Kevin D. Dumouchelle, Brooklyn Museum, [email protected] The last several years have witnessed the announcement or opening of a significant number of new exhibition spaces and strategies for the display of permanent collections of African art in museums around the world. This roundtable will aim to present and critically engage with a number of these recent experiences. How, for example, are European ethnographic museums adjusting and interpreting histories of colonial-era collecting and ethnographic display for 21st century audiences? How are curators in encyclopedic museums challenged to interpret African art in relation to other collections? What new interpretative concepts and practices are emerging from these projects, and how might they inform both future museum projects and the writing and teaching of African art history and related disciplines? Additional Participants: Kathleen Bickford Berzock Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University [email protected] Anne-Marie Bouttiaux Royal Museum for Central Africa [email protected] Jan-Lodewijk Grootaers Minneapolis Institute of Arts [email protected] Anitra Nettleton Centre for the Creative Arts of Africa, University of the Witwatersrand [email protected] Barbara Plankensteiner Weltmuseum Wien [email protected] BREAK FOR LUNCH (1:30 – 2:45 PM) LUNCH SESSION, 1:30–2:45 pm Beaux-Arts Court. POSTER SESSION: Current Practice in Museum Labels for African Art. Organized by Kathryn Wysocki Gunsch, Baltimore Museum of Art, [email protected] Conference participants working in museums will post labels currently used in their galleries to allow for comparison between institutions. Labels will be uploaded to the ACASA website for future reference. Session 3 (3:00 – 4:45 PM) 3.1 ROUNDTABLE: African Art and the University Museum: Challenges and Goals in the 21st Century. Convener: Matthew Francis Rarey, University of Wisconsin– Madison, [email protected] This roundtable will seek to think critically about the challenges and goals of permanent displays of the arts of Africa at university museums across the United States. In such spaces, the research and teaching goals of the university necessarily inform curatorial decisions. Yet African objects and displays may be uniquely positioned to answer questions applicable across the entire museum. As such, this roundtable will take up the following questions: How does the presence of African art impact the university and its museums? What is the relationship between current scholarship, practices of collecting and display, and teaching and social engagement? And how are these challenges informed by histories of African objects and contemporary displays? Additional Participants: Allyson Purpura Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [email protected] Rebecca M. Nagy Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, Gainesville [email protected] Marla C. Berns Fowler Museum at UCLA [email protected] Discussant: Henry Drewal University of Wisconsin–Madison [email protected] Thursday, March 20, 2014 Session 4 (9:15 – 11:00 AM) 4.1 South African Photobooks: A Continuously Changing Narrative. Convener: Michael Godby, University of Cape Town, [email protected] Originally comprising hand-printed, tipped-in photographs of seemingly arbitrary scenery, the South African photobook soon came to celebrate the colonial achievement in civilization and industry. Around the middle of the twentieth century, photographers, still marginalized by the art world, turned to the photobook as a vehicle for artistic expression on given themes—of landscape, for example—and others, notably Black photographers, used it for expressly political ends. Currently, South African photographers, confident of their position in the art world, use the form routinely as part of their artistic expression. This panel will explore case studies from these three chapters of South African photobook history. Presenters: The Royal Edinburgh Album of Cape Photographs, 1867 Michael Godby The Royal Edinburgh Album of Cape Photographs was first presented to Queen Victoria’s second son Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, during his second visit to Cape Town and, with permission, published in London in 1868. The photographs were made by the Rev William Curtis and were described at the time as “the most complete set of views of Cape scenery in photography by an adept gifted with an artist eye”. This paper collects what little is known of Rev Curtis and examines the achievements of his amateur “artist eye” in the context of early commercial photographic albums of Cape scenery. Reissuing the Narrative: David Goldblatt’s On the Mines 1973/2012 Amy Halliday ArtThrob: Contemporary South African Art [email protected] In March 1968, Optima – the magazine of the Anglo American corporation – published ‘The Witwatersrand: A Time and Tailings’, a photo essay by David Goldblatt with text by Nadine Gordimer. The essay would go on to become the first of three sections in Goldblatt’s inaugural photobook, On the Mines (1973). If ‘Tailings’ nostalgically documented the mine dumps, waste water lakes and industrial detritus that gave form to the Witwatersrand of Goldblatt's childhood, On the Mines also tracked other tales of South Africa structured by the mines: the dangerous subterranean world of shaftsinking, and the deeply unequal relationships played out above the surface, figured through portraits of ‘mining men’. The reissue of On the Mines in 2012 by international publishing house STEIDL, just months after the tragedy at the Lonmin platinum mines, prompts questions of continuity and change in the national narrative around mining and labour relations. By bookending his career to date, this re-issuing - with an “expanded view” in which several images are added, omitted, resequenced, appear in colour, or are otherwise altered – also captures the traces and tailings of Goldblatt’s aesthetic, personal and professional trajectory A Tale of Two Cities: Luanda in the Photobooks of Jo Ractliffe and Michael MacGarry Liese van der Watt University of Johannesburg [email protected] This paper will look at the different narratives that emerge from two contemporary photobooks on the same subject, the city of Luanda in Angola. In Jo Ractliffe’s Terreno Occupado (2008), the artist explores an ongoing interest in liminality, transience and notions of absence by examining urban Luanda in a series of contemplative black-and-white photos. Michael MacGarry’s The Republic of Luanda (2011) constructs a seemingly different story of the same city through colour photos of a bustling, if ambivalent urban space. A comparison of these two photo essays reveals the curatorial drive inherent in the mechanism of the photobook. Blinding the Truth: Mikhael Subotzky’s “Retinal Shift” Federico Freschi University of Johannesburg [email protected] As winner of the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist Award for 2012, Mikhael Subotzky produced a large-scale project entitled ‘Retinal Shift’. Underlying this project, and the photobook accompanying it, is an interrogation of the role of the documentary photographer as passive recorder, whose subjectivity is ostensibly sacrificed on the altar of objectivity. Ironically, Subotzky was blinded at the moment that his retinas – the title images of the project – were photographed. This resonated powerfully with the photographer, serving as a reminder of our ‘blindness’ in relation to the photograph: repeated exposure to a seemingly endless parade of images of human suffering and degradation renders us immune to them; the initial shock wears off, as Susan Sontag reminds us, as quickly as pornography’s arousal. In this paper I consider how Subotzky uses the medium of the photobook