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W.E.B. Du Bois Institute - News & Events
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Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research and holder of the distinguished title of Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University. He is the author of twelve books, including several award-winning works of literary criticism as well as the memoir Colored People; The Future of the Race, co-authored with Cornel West; Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man; and Tradition and the Black Atlantic. Gates has hosted ten PBS television specials, including Looking for Lincoln and the two part series, African American Lives, upon which his book In Search of Our Roots (2009) was based. He is winner of the 2009 Ralph Lowell Award for Outstanding Contributions to Public Television and the 2010 NAACP Image Award for Non-Fiction.
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| Video Profile of Teodros Kiros featured on the Berklee College of Music Website |
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Linda Heywood and John Thornton in the L.A. Times
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Joanna Lipper's Seaweed Farmers SeriesFeatured in Picturing Power and Potential Photography Exhibition
June 15th - August 27th, 2010
Opening Reception: June 15th, 5:30-7:30
Presented by the San Francisco Arts Comission Gallery and the International Museum of Women
NOTE SPECIAL LOCATION APRIL 1st: Tsai Auditorium, CGIS, 1730 Cambridge Street
Rudenstine Gallery: Current Exhibits
Africans in Black & White: Images of Blacks in 16th- & 17th-Century Prints
On View September 2th - December 3rd, 2010. Opening Reception: Thursday, September 2, 2010, 6 PM -7:30 PM
In conjunction with the publication of the first four books of the ten-book Image of the Black in Western Art series, the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute and Harvard Art Museums present Africans in Black and White: Black Figures in 16th- and 17th-Century Prints
Artists include Albrecht Dürer, Hendrick Goltzius, Rembrandt, and Peter Paul Rubens. Exhibition curated by David Bindman, emeritus professor of the history of art, University College London, and 2010 Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University, and Anna Knaap, Visiting Fellow, Jesuit Institute, Boston College.
On November 15th the M. Victor Leventritt Symposium will be held in the Thompson Room, Barker Center featuring show curators and contributors from the Image of the Black in Western Art book series.
Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn
The Beheading of John the Baptist, 1640
Harvard Art Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Anonymous Loan in honor of Jakob Rosenberg,
41.2000 Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College
Previous Exhibits
Photographs
In partnership with the Du Bois Institute, Autograph ABP presents a retrospective exhibition of large-scale colour and black and white photographs from the estate of Rotimi Fani-Kayode, including archival works exhibited here for the first time.
Produced during the 1980s in a career spanning only six years, often in collaboration with his late partner Alex Hirst, Fani-Kayode’s photographic scenarios constitute a profound narrative of sexual and cultural difference, seminal in their exploration of complex notions of diaspora, identity, spirituality and the black male body as subject of desire.
The highly saturated and sexually charged colour tableaux from Fani-Kayode’s Bodies of Experience and Ecstatic Antibodies series are juxtaposed with the ambiguous subtlety and formal aesthetics of his black and white portfolio. Inspired by what Yoruba priests call ‘the technique of ecstasy’, his photographs fuse archetypal motifs from European and African cultures, tracing ancestral memories through a provocative symbolism to evoke a dialogue between past, present and future.
"On three counts I am an outsider: in matters of sexuality; in terms of geographical and cultural dislocation; and in the sense of not having become the sort of respectably married professional my parents might have hoped for." - Rotimi Fani-Kayode.
Intensely personal and politically engaged, Kayode’s oeuvre is central to various critical discourses in British photography of the late twentieth-century. A founding member and first Chair of Autograph ABP, Fani-Kayode died in 1989. This exhibition marks twenty years since Fani-Kayode’s death, and is closely linked to the establishment of Autograph ABP’s Archive and Research Centre for Culturally Diverse Photography at Rivington Place, London.
Rotimi Fani-Kayode was born in Nigeria in 1955 to a prominent Yoruba family who left Africa as refugees in 1966. He studied in the United States, before settling in the UK in 1983, where he lived and worked until his early death at the age of 34 on December 21, 1989.
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Autograph ABP is a charity that works internationally to educate the public in photography, with a particular emphases on issues of cultural identity and human rights. They achieve this through formal and informal education programs, exhibitions, publishing and the creation of an archive of culturally diverse photography that is accessible to the public for research. For more information, please visit their website at: www.autograph-abp.co.uk
Sketches from the Shore
Lyle Ashton Harris's work traverses the terrain of complicated gender and racial identity. His semiautobiographical portraits also invoke performance and disguise.(Read more)
Journey of My Soul: Come Along for the Ride
"New England is hardly known for an absence of culture or a failure to appreciate the arts. In fact, Cambridge, Massachusetts can legitimately be tagged as the epicenter, the cradle of the tension and brawls between the cultural melieus of tradition and modernity. Sparks fly from these collisions and engagements on a daily, if not hourly schedule.
The work of Suesan Stovall, recently on exhibit in the Neil and Angelica Rudenstine Gallery of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University is an example of such an encounter. For in this citadel, Ms. Stovall fronted and framed her song and stories, and in the house that Henry Louis “Skip” Gates built, her images, both stinging and sacred, float in the ether as if she’s held a backstage pass to the African American experience. They are neither burdened nor ponderous, yet insisting of place somewhere, talisman like, and in all American households.
The installation, titled, ‘Journey of My Soul, Come Along for the Ride’, is a sweeping recount of historical attitudes, and is consistent with Ms. Stovall’s interest in assemblage as a medium, and her passionate belief and life journey to discover and develop things not always rolled out as the obvious."
Excerpt from: Jeffrey McNary, …glimpses of the scared and chillin’ art of Suesan Stovall
Essay copyright: © Jeffrey McNary 2008. All rights reserved.