Neil L. and Angelica Zander Rudenstine Gallery
As the only exhibition space at Harvard devoted to works by and about people of African descent, the Du Bois Institute’s Rudenstine Gallery is a welcome addition to the campus. Named in honor of former Harvard President Neil L. Rudenstine and art historian Angelica Zander Rudestine, in recognition of their contributions to African and African American Studies and to the arts, the gallery hosts rotating exhibitions and accompanying artist talks. Its curatorial mission is to support both historical and contemporary practices in the visual arts.
Location: 104 Mount Auburn Street, Floor 3R, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
Gallery Hours: Monday - Friday, 9AM - 5PM
Ongoing Exhibitions
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
Past Exhibitions
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. From his new series on Ghana and his critique of the shifting concepts of African modernity to his mixed-media installations on masculinity centered on French soccer player Zinedine Zidane and his deeply intriguing self-reincarnations, Harris fearlessly confronts his own personal narrative and forces all who interact with his imagery to rethink and reimagine what it means to be both black and American, male and female, alien as well as citizen.
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.
All About Eve: Women, Sex, and Desire
"Carrie Mae Weems shows up at the right historic moments, blending with an imperfect past. In her most recent film, Italian Dreams, 2006, Weems is both siren and taskmaster, drifting through the halls of Cinecittà in Rome like she owns the place. (Cinecittà opened in 1937 and later was the studio where Fellini shot most of his films from 1950 to 1990.) She is also the perpetual outsider, rifling through history in an attempt to settle the present. Weems has a broad timeline and a specific mission to probe race, gender and power through her photographs, films and installations while organizing history through its re-stagings."
Excerpt from: Cheryl Kaplan, THE SCREEN TEST: CARRIE MAE WEEMS UP CLOSE
Essay copyright: © Cheryl Kaplan 2007. All rights reserved.
Bojeo: Traces in a Fragmented History
Bojeo, signifying “navigating through a territory” in Spanish, was an exhibition of mixed media, featuring photographs, early-printmaking photogravure, and video. Campos-Pons says of her work “the art of the African Diaspora is an act of searching our own histories, our selfidentity, in the New World.”
Being Here and Not There: Fragments and Reliquaries from Robben Island
The mixed-media installation, Being Here and Not There: Fragments and Reliquaries from Robben Island, by South African artist Paul Stopforth presented mundane objects as sacred. Created while he was a visiting scholar at Robben Island, Stopforth had this to say about the exhibition: “Like fragments of the true cross, they are at once insignificant and holy, discards as well as witnesses to the ongoing, shifting nature of our lives and our histories.”
Looking for Langston: Images by Isaac Julien and Sunil Gupta
The photographs that comprised the exhibition, Looking for Langston: Images by Isaac Julien and Sunil Gupta, were taken by filmmaker Isaac Julien and cinematographer Sunil Gupta, during the filming of Julien’s groundbreaking film of the same name. Looking for Langston is a metaphoric reflection on African American poet Langston Hughes and is a non-linear narrative that includes footage of 1920’s Harlem and unflinchingly explores his life as a gay man.
Resistance and Revolution: Jacob Lawrence's Toussaint L'Ouverture Prints
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(C) 2009 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
EVER YOUNG: JAMES BARNOR, Street and Studio Photography, Ghana/UK
Autograph ABP and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute jointly present the first exhibition in the US of James Barnor’s work.
A seminal collection that features a range of archival photographs, including street and studio portraits with elaborate backdrops, fashion shoots in glorious colour, and social documentary images from the late 1940s to the 1970s depicting a burgeoning modernity as the Gold Coast becomes Ghana.
Barnor’s archive was produced during a career spanning more than sixty years. It not only covers a remarkable period in history but also bridges continents and photographic genres, creating a transatlantic narrative marked by his passionate interest in people and cultures. Through the medium of portraiture, Barnor’s photographs represent societies in transition: Ghana moving towards its independence and London becoming a cosmopolitan, multicultural metropolis.
In the early 1950s, Barnor’s photographic studio Ever Young was visited by civil servants and dignitaries, performance artists and newly-weds. While taking assignments for African Drum magazine, Barnor documented the glamorous fashion style of 1960s swinging London and captured intimate moments of luminaries such as Kwame Nkrumah; boxing champion Roy Ankrah, dubbed the Black Flash; Mike Egan, broadcaster for the BBC Africa Service; and Mohammed Ali preparing to fight Brian London in the early in 1966.
Alongside the photographic display, we are proud to present the award-winning Black Audio Film Collective feature film ‘Testament’ (1988), directed by John Akomfrah, an experimental narrative of exile, Diaspora and dispossession.
This exhibition is closely linked to the establishment of Autograph ABP’s Archive and Research Centre for Culturally Diverse Photography (opening in Spring 2011) at Rivington Place, London and emerged as a direct result of archival research supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund. A major James Barnor retrospective is scheduled for October 2010 at Rivington Place, London, UK.
James Barnor was born in Accra, Ghana, in 1929. He started his own photographic practice in 1949 in a makeshift street studio in Jamestown, until he opened Ever Young Studio in 1953. In the early 1950s, he began working for The Daily Graphic newspaper and later Drum magazine. He came to England in December 1959 to study photography at Medway College of Art in Rochester, Kent. He continued working for African lifestyle publications before returning home in 1970 to establish the first colour processing laboratory in Ghana. During the next 24 years, he also worked for the American Embassy and for J. J. Rawlings at Osu Castle. In 1994, he returned to London, where he currently lives.
