Through May 5, the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art presents “ReSignifications,” a reimagined slice of a 2015 exhibit staged at New York University’s Villa La Pietra in Florence, Italy. Guest curator Awam Amkpa has whittled down the most poignant pieces of work, which completely overhaul the depiction of black bodies over time.
RESIGNIFICATIONS Curator Awam Amkpa asked several contemporary artists to interrogate and respond to the Western art history trope of the blackamoor, an African depicted as servile or decorative. Through May 5.
‘ReSignifications,” at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art, is a pointed object lesson. What can we learn from blackamoors, the servile black figures in art history?
Thirty-six blackamoor statues, mostly made in the 18th and 19th centuries, reside in New York University’s Villa La Pietra, a historic home housing an art collection in Florence. Curator Awam Amkpa invited an international slate of artists to respond to these figures for a 2015 exhibition there.
"We are pleased to announce that the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery’s inaugural exhibition will comprise selections from the Jean Pigozzi Collection of Contemporary African Art (CAAC). David Adjaye, the renowned British-Ghanaian architect and the designer of the Cooper Gallery and the Hutchins Center façade, also serves as co-curator of this first exhibit, along with Mariane Ibrahim-Lenhardt.
A few weeks before the revamped Harvard Art Museums reopened here, a new university-affiliated art space, the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art, made its debut in modest quarters, two former storefront offices off Harvard Square, filling a slot that other local institutions left all but empty. The raw spaces were unpromising, to say the least, but the architect David Adjaye has done miracles in linking them and carving out eight nichelike galleries for the first show, "Luminós/C/ity.Ordinary Joy: From the Pigozzi Contemporary African Art Collection,” for which he... Read more about New York Times: 'A New Destination for African Art'
ate 2014 and we are in a space of reflection, the subject of which is everyday life in the African metropolis, that cultural ‘elsewhere’ which the discipline of art history usually shrouds in mystery and myth.
We see a giant bicycle, fashioned out of ropes and wood; a miniature...
De la Fuente has described Grupo Antillano as a forgotten visual arts and cultural movement that thrived between 1978 and 1983. The group proclaimed the centrality of African practices in national culture. For them, Africa and the surrounding Caribbean was not a dead cultural heritage but a vibrant, ongoing and vital influence that continued to define what it means to be Cuban.
What does it mean to be Cuban? That’s a complicated question, bound to evoke different answers, depending on whom you ask. Raoul Castro might say one thing, Marco Rubio another. The descendant of a Spanish sugar producer, an African slave’s great-great grandchild another. And the many Cubans from multiracial families might have their own way of looking at identity. For a group of Cuban artists known as Grupo Antillano, their answer, proclaimed in a 1978 manifesto, was: “We are Latin-Africans.” African origin was, for them, the foundation that should guide the development of Cuba’s... Read more about Arts Fuse: 'Visual Arts Review: Asserting Cuban Identity — Through Art'
Grupo Antillano has largely slipped through the cracks of Cuban art history. The movement, active from 1978 to 1983, celebrated African and Afro-Caribbean influences in Cuban culture. “Drapetomanía: Grupo Antillano and the Art of Afro-Cuba,” on view at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, traces the movement and where it has led. It’s a strong show, woven with turmoil and hope.
La exposición colectiva Drapetomanía: Grupo Antillano y el Arte de Afro-Cuba llega a la Universidad de Harvard este 29 de enero tras haberse mostrado en Nueva York, San Francisco, Santiago de Cuba y La Habana.
Curada y comisariada por el historiador Alejandro de la Fuente, profesor de la Universidad de Harvard, la muestra se complementa con el libro Grupo Antillano: el arte de Afro-Cuba, editado por el mismo, con ensayos de críticos de arte e historiadores como Guillermina Ramos Cruz, José Veigas y Judith Bettelheim, entre otros.
La exposición colectiva Drapetomanía: Grupo Antillano y el Arte de Afro-Cuba llega a la Universidad de Harvard este 29 de enero tras haberse mostrado en Nueva York, San Francisco, Santiago de Cuba y La Habana.
Expuesta originalmente en el Centro Provincial de Artes Plásticas y Diseño en Santiago de Cuba (abril-mayo, 2013), donde fue descrita como “una de las mejores muestras de artes plásticas de los últimos años en Santiago de Cuba”, Drapetomanía viaja ahora a la Galería Ethelbert Cooper de Arte Africano y Afro-Americano de la Universidad de Harvard tras haberse expuesto en el Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales en La Habana, la Galería The 8th Floor de Nueva York y el Museo de la Diáspora Africana (MoAD) en San Francisco.
James Baldwin wrote, "The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers." Few galleries of art hold true to that magnetic north like the recently opened Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at Harvard University. In this space, stories dance. Tales unfold, enlightening and reminding of the African diaspora and its hopes, dreams, visions and tears. There's heavy traffic in such endeavors, with much wreckage on the roadside and splinters on the rocks of those beckoned by the Lorelei. One does not just "put up a show" when it comes to... Read more about Artslant: 'LIKE IN REVELATIONS... and other such things'
The story of “Drapetomania: Grupo Antillano and the Art of Afro-Cuba” is one of discovery and rediscovery. For visitors to the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art, it’s a stunning find, tucked away in the former commercial space that reopened as the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research last fall. For the 30 artists represented, it illustrates the uncovering of an artistic heritage, and a lineage that was long denied.