Virtual Conference: Reshaping the Field: Arts from the African Diasporas on Display

CCS Bard is pleased to present the online conference Reshaping the Field: Arts of the African Diasporas on Display on November 4-6, 2021, and will highlight exhibition case studies that have created ruptures in how Blackness has been framed through exhibitions and stresses how Black artists have been viewed and African diasporic art histories have been shaped.
Reshaping the Field is inspired by and honors art historian and curator Bridget Cooks’s groundbreaking monograph Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum, which was the first critical exploration of exhibitions in major American art museums that focus on African American artists. Cooks identifies in her study two methodological paradigms: the “anthropological,” emphasizing Black racial difference and white normalcy, and “the corrective approach,” aimed at redefining and expanding American art. Reshaping the Field: Arts of the African Diasporas on Display aims to expand the field of exhibition histories through a selection of pioneering exhibitions that have shaped the domain of Black art today.

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