Art History and Diaspora:
Genealogies, Theories, Practices
Friday, April 25, 2008 - April 26, 2008
This Clark Conference, convened by Mora Beauchamp-Byrd, Natasha Becker and C. Ondine Chavoya, brought together artists, curators, and art historians to investigate the impact of the field of diaspora studies on art historical scholarship. How has diaspora—with its connotations of forced migration due to political expulsion, enslavement, shifting belief systems, war, and other forms of nationalist conflict—shaped both art-making and art historical scholarship in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries?
Participants included:
Mora J. Beauchamp-Byrd, Southern University at New Orleans; Natasha Becker, Research and Academic Program; Lisa Bloom, University of California, San Diego; John P. Bowles, Indiana University; Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Artist, US; C. Ondine Chavoya, Williams College; Allan deSouza, San Francisco Art Institute; Pamela R. Franco, Tulane University; Barnor Hesse, Northwestern University; May Joseph, Pratt Institute; Kobena Mercer, Middlesex University, London, UK; Yong Soon Min, University of California, Irvine; Simon Njami, Independent Critic and Curator, France; Nikos Papastergiadis, University of Melbourne; Richard Powell, Duke University; Judy Ramgolam, Central University of Technology—Free State, South Africa; E. Carmen Ramos, Arts Council of Princeton, Princeton; Vesela Sretenovic, Bell Gallery, List Art Center, Brown University
Program:
In order of discussion
Art and Diaspora
Art as Cosmopolitan Dialogue
Nikos Papastergiadis
Localized Acts and Transnational America: Art, Exchange, and Diaspora
John P. Bowles
Tracing Diasporas
The Post-61 Generation: Notes on the Dominican Artistic Diaspora in the United States
E. Carmen Ramos
Shock, Globalization, and Performance
May Joseph
Transnational Collisions
TransPOP: Korean Wave in the Korean Diaspora
Yong Soon Min
The Role of the Visual in Capturing/Questioning Contemporary History: Walid Raad and Beirut Project(s)
Vesela Sretenovic
Diasporic Intersections in Photography
When I am not Here/Estoy alla
Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons
Flyboy: Photography and Transition
Allan deSouza
Diasporas and their Histories
African Diaspora: A Vexing Issue in Art History
Pamela R. Franco
Diaspora Aesthetics: Some Dialogical Propositions
Kobena Mercer
Framing Diaspora
From Diaspora to Exile: Black Women Artists in 1960s Europe
Richard Powell
Discrepant Blackness: Diaspora in the Art of “Transrupting” Britishness
Barnor Hesse
Screening of Isaac Julien’s True North
Re-Imaginings
Collaborations between Scholars of Visual Culture and Artists: Lisa
Bloom’s Gender on Ice (1993) and Isaac Julien’s True North (2006)
Lisa Bloom
Identity, place, and displacement: Visual Representations of Maggie van Schalkwyk and Avitha Sooful
Judy Ramgolam
Diaspora and Memory
Broken Memories
Simon Njami
* Along side the conference, participants attended Artist's Talk: Julie Mehretu on City Sitings, moderated by Clark Fellow Chika Okeke-Agulu on Thursday at the Williams College Museum of Art.
