REFRACTION AND RESISTANCE: WRITING AFRICAN ART

RAP Graduate Student Symposium

April 14, 2023

The Research and Academic Program (RAP) at the Clark Art Institute invited graduate students for a one-day symposium, “Refraction and Resistance: Writing African Art,” held at the Clark in Williamstown, Massachusetts. 

This convening welcomed case studies of objects and artistic practices that illuminate defiance against the theoretical architectures that confine rather than expand ideas about African art. We welcomed papers on historical and contemporary artists, scholars, architects, and beyond that engage in different ways with narratives of resistance. This included objects that shatter both expectations of what African objects should be as well as how we analyze them. Papers could be discursive or interdisciplinary in nature and could feature objects that are provocative outliers to extant categorical systems generated by colonial frameworks; for example, objects that stand between ethnic or national borders, those that present syncretic stylization, or artists that complicate fixed identities, to name just a few.

The symposium was convened by Talia Abrahams (Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art, ’23) and organized by the Research and Academic Program. 

The event concluded with a public keynote delivered by Joshua I. Cohen (associate professor of Art History, City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center, New York) on “Displacement and the Opaque in Francophone African Modern Art.”

This symposium keynote address drew from a current book project examining African modernisms in the Francophone contexts of decolonization and the global Cold War.

^{Image: Kerfala Yansané in “Bigolo,” Le Théâtre Africain de Keita Fodéba, c 1949-50; image from Le Théâtre Africain de Kéïta Fodéba (Paris: Pierre Seghers, 1950); photo by Müller.}