CALENDAR

Interrogating African Modernity: Art, Cultural Politics and Global Identities.

Symposium on Modern and Contemporary African Art.

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• The symposium brings together major international scholars to discuss the history and critical reception of modern African art in art history and cultural studies. Its central question (when was [or is] modern African art?) provides a framework for investigating how individual artistic practice in Africa intersected with local and global discourses of modernity. It analyzes the invention of specific visual languages of modernist expression in Africa and how African artists struggled with principal questions about the meanings of African cultural representation within the matrix of modern art, and the meanings of their location as modern African artists within discourses of nationalism and internationalism. It also investigates the changing conditions of artistic practice in Africa in the 20 th century and the ideologies of formal and conceptual representation that underpinned such changes. The Symposium is funded by the Mbanefo Foundation and supported by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, the African Studies Research Focus Group and Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of California Santa Barbara.