What does it mean to shift boundaries? The panelists at the Eighth Annual American Art History Graduate Student Symposium at Yale University explored strategies of deconstructing the subject matter of “Black Art” through critical interpretation. Each student was examining “Black Art” from the perspective of American Art discourse. The discussions ranged from comparing the physical architectural structures of African American and African Diasporan museums to redefining the position of black artists place in the context of art history …read more
One of the panelists, Katherine Jentelson presented the work of William Edmondson in the framework of his agency being defined according to institutional agendas. He was a sculptor, grave stone artist, and the first African American artist to have a solo exhibition at the MoMA in the 1930s. The show at MoMA was marketed with the phrase “a Negro Shows art in the Modern Museum” in Time magazine. One of Jentelson’s main polemics was the way Edmonson was characterised and manufactured by a “White Supremacist institution,” as she calls it …read more
Much like Jentelson, Joanna Fiduccia also discussed the reframing of a black artist’s work. She presented an intriguing analysis of William Pope L.’s public performances. Her presentation posited that Pope L.’s work could be framed in the context of land art. The main works which she examined were his self burial piece and William Pope L.’s crawling performances. She said that Pope L. “opens up space and democratizes it”. The masochistic nature of the crawls can be seen as a means of ‘obliterating the body’ which was compared to the racist practice of lynching in which, once obliterated, the body becomes integrated into the landscape …read more
The keynote speaker was Northwestern University Professor and Harvard University WEB Dubois Institute for African African American Research Fellow, Huey Copeland, discussing his book entitled, Bound To Appear. His book discusses the work of Renee Green, Lorna Simpson, Glenn Ligon and Fred Wilson. He asserts that these artists are architects of the what Copeland termed the “lingua franca” of black political dissent in in the form of installation art. Each of the artists integrated text, objects, and other elements such as sound to establish connections to ideas of race and agency indirectly referencing the issues of the time, for example, LA riots, Rodney King, police brutality …read more
The Symposium managed to address some relevant questions and simultaneously prove to be problematic. The shifting boundaries seemed to be moving towards a new era of ubiquitous historical revisionism. Are boundaries shifting to a place where there can be an accessible discourse on black art where the normative group can avoid the paternalistic pitfalls of the past? It is doubtful.
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Contributed by: Jabari Owens-Bailey, Curatorial Fellow
One cannot talk about beauty or fashion without discussing the body. Bringing the two together (the black body as explored through beauty and fashion) is what Tisch School of the Arts and Institute of African-American Affairs presented at the two day symposium, Beauty and Fashion: The Black Portrait Symposium. I saw this symposium as an ontology of blackness, a philosphical exploration, with fashion as the lens to explore black existence and the categories that this existence lies in. Fashion (past, present, future) is a category to understand the systematics of how black identity, and racial identity generally, is thought through and subversed 
Panel two, Fashioning Beauty, included: Leslie King-Hammond and Lowery Stokes Sims speaking on their collaborative exhibition at Museum of Art and Design, Global Africa Project. Maya Lake, a young fashion designer, followed the talk on The Global Africa Project. She started her own clothing line, Boxing Kitten. Lake combines common African fabrics that were fashioned in the 1960s and 1970s black power movement with conservative styles of the 1950s during the civil rights movement 
Parsons School of Design at The New School hosted its first international conference on the state of Black culture in art and design education recently
done easily. The fiction bibliography is the most advanced – with around 900 entries – while there is more work to be done for poetry – which also has around 900 entries to date – while the drama bibliography is the least developed currently.
From Thursday, March 10 to Sunday, March 13, Independent Curators International, the New Museum, and the Ph.D. Program in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center collaborated to present an international conference, 
Lu Jie, Director and Chief Curator of the Long March Project in Beijing gave a talk which stood out as an excellent case study for examining emerging curatorial practices, conceiving new models for community involvement, and combating capitalistic practices of traditional museums. The curatorial mission of the 2004 project was to bring contemporary international and Chinese art to the rural and working classes of China to combat issues of access, focussing on 
the fact that South Africa is home to a number of large, historic, and well endowed museums and art institutions, including the South African National Gallery (est. 1930) and the Johannesburg Art Gallery (est. 1915). However, because these venues were built to aid apartheid and the colonial project, history is steeped in their very structure. … In contrast to these traditional institutions, Ngcobo introduced the audience to the 
