Welcome to this gateway to my past, present and future work as an art historian, exhibition curator, writer and lecturer. Explore my research interests such as Negrophilia – the avant garde fascination with black culture, and Diaspora Dialogs, my current teaching at Cornell that establishes conversations with artists in the African Diaspora; or, find information on Caribbean Artists in the new A-Z directory, now with videos! Feel free to comment on what you see in the Dialogs and Hot Topics blogs or simply use the site as a way of linking to Diaspora artists or other sites that I have found useful. Recent Work
During Kingston On The Edge, Caribbean Dialogs joined members of 'red rubberband' to help paint a wall near Kingston's Heroe's Circle. While the paint was drying we took time out to make this video and find out more about the murals that are popping up all over the city...watch the video: red rubberband mural project.
Last week, I examined final year painting displays at Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts. Without breaching confidentiality, I can say that it was a mixed bag offering images and installations that speak of the social and personal issues that artists are grappling with today. Issues range from intimate anxieties expressed with unique dreamworld imagery influenced by the psychanalysis of Freud and Jung, to contentious portraits referencing dance hall, exploitation and the black female body. Of course, there was also the more abstract and esoteric works such as painstaking compositions of withered wild orchid leaves, and the surprise of film-making that offered the best of Adobe, Flash and Final Cut Pro techniques. Also satisfying was the movement away from two dimensional forms into off the wall installations, digital spaces and virtual worlds. This final show is worth visiting.
Cornell's store hosted a special book event featuring the Radical History Review's latest issue, "Reconceptualizations of the African Diaspora" edited by Erica Bell, Melina Pappademos and Michelle Ann Stephens. I attended virtually by presenting a podcast that reviewed this new publication. Watch the video Travelling Light.
The book is a formal contribution to the field of cultural studies that helps to define and articulate the African Diaspora's current existence and " rethink current understandings of African and diaspora as a dispersal of Africans from the African continent via the Atlantic slave trade and offer re-conceptualizations of dominant paradigms, such as home, origins, migrations, politics, blackness, African, Africa, African-descended, and Americanness." It features some important scholars in the field of African Diaspora studies.
New Courses
Caribbean Dialogs explores Caribbean culture through the prism of its cultural products, art, music, and literature. This summer course combines research, innovative technology, stimulating reading and 'real time' on line conversations to build an understanding of cultural life in the region. Caribbean dialogs [.com] examines the creative spirit of the region's artists to show ways that they reconfiguring themselves to meet the needs of a changing world at once apprehensive but also charmed by black culture. Watch the video
This summer, in addition to teaching my Caribbean Dialogs course, I will be co-teaching a four week SCE summer session with Prof. Cheryl Finley. The course is called the Black Arts Movement and it examines the art, music, literature and film of African Americans during the 1960’s. The Black Arts Movement was an explosive cultural flourishing that emerged in the wake of African liberation and decolonization movements abroad and Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the USA and the African Diaspora. Watch the Video
Negrophilia.com.jm
Negrophilia [the book] describes the craze for black culture that was popular among avant-garde artists and bohemian types in 20s Paris. The Parisian avant garde adopted Negrophilia and its taboos to enhance their outsider status. Their flirtation with aspects of African-American popular forms such as jazz, Josephine Baker etc, was a way to rekindle their own primitive states. Black culture facilitated their regression to the primitive within. Negrophilia [the blog] considers how this love of black culture has persisted into the present day.Although, the passion for black culture and a "primitivised" existence flourished in the 1920s, when artists yearned for a simpler, idyllic lifestyle to counter the first world war’s mechanised violence, this kind of primitivism is not confined to art history. more..»
Diaspora Dialogs
Diaspora Dialogs initiates a conversation about artistic practice amongst artists scattered around the globe. That dispersal has come to be labeled as a 'diaspora' a term originally exclusive to those of Jewish descent, but in the last century used increasingly with reference to the new world experience of blacks in post-slavery and more recently post-colonial communities. Diaspora dialogs attempts a conversation between such scattered voices in real time as a way of articulating, defining and exploring how the experience of cultural dislocation has impacted cultural production. Visit Diaspora Dialogs.
Black Magic
A series of publications related to my reading of Black Magic that establishes links between European and African diaspora thought structures as applied to Western art history. These texts and curatorial projects bring new and different meanings to the term Black Magic with little historical precedent. It is a theoretical approach and collective title for a series of projects that discuss the relationship between two cultures; their shared superstitions and imagery. The working title for this series of essays is Black Magic: Representing Race from Ra to Rastafari. And whereas the term black magic, might reflect its European arcane and medieval origins, its relationship to other issues of representation, race and the study of black visual history invites a leap into subject matter that is less known.more..»