Fall 2011 Africa at Noon Events
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Revisiting Linkages between the UW-Madison African Studies Program and African American Studies / Art Exhibitions and Teaching from UW-Madison Union Galleries to the Elvehjem Museum of Art (Chazen) since the 1970s: The Implication of Museological Spaces for the Study of African and Afro-American Art
Evjue-Bascom Professor, Department of Afro-American Studies, Gender & Women’s Studies, affiliate Faculty in the Department of Art and one of the founders of Visual Culture Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Professor of African-American and Modern/Contemporary African Art and Visual Culture.
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Time and Location: 12:00pm, 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive, Madison, WI
Presented as part of a special series of Africa at Noon talks by distinguished affiliates and alumni on the development and influence of Wisconsin’s African Studies Program.
Co-sponsored by the African Diaspora and Atlantic World Research Circle
Download poster (PDF)
Speaker’s Bio:
Evjue-Bascom Freida High W. Tesfagiorgis, Department of Afro-American Studies and Gender & Women’s Studies; Affiliate faculty in Department of Art and one of the founders of the area of Visual Culture Studies at UW-Madison-now a Center for Visual Cultures with a Ph.D. minor. She is Professor of African American and modern/contemporary African art and visual culture. After receiving her Master of Arts and Master of Fine Arts in the early 1970s, which included the study of African Art at Indiana University, she was invited to become Artist-in-Residence in Afro-American Studies; then Assistant Professor. Though recruited elsewhere, subsequently, she decided to remain at the UW-Madison to build the African-American and African art history curriculum in the African-American Studies Department, the M.A. program (approved 1985), and the gender studies area. More recently, she initiated the MA-Ph.D. Bridge with Art History, similar to the Afro-American Studies MA-Ph.D. Bridges to the English and History Departments. She coined the term “Afrofemcentrism” in early 1980s in publications on black women artists. Of her publications, her most known work is the seminal “In Search of a Discourse and Critique/s that Center the Art of Black Women Artists” first published in Theorizing Black Feminism, ed. Stanlie James (1993), and 5th time in The Feminist and Visual Culture Reader, ed. Amelia Jones (2009). Others include, “Interweaving Black Feminism and Art History: Framing Nigeria” in Contemporary Textures: Multi-Dimensionality in Nigerian Art (ed. Nkiru Nzegwu); latest “1897.com: Peju Layiwola’s Meta-monument” in catalogue Art and the Restitution Question (2010). She has exhibited nationally and internationally in invitational and juried exhibitions from the Milwaukee Museum of Art to Mueso Arte Contemporanea di Gibellina in Palermo. She has curated exhibitons, juried exhibitions, lectured internationally, and consulted for United States Information in Germany (Berlin, Hamburg, Hanover), and for the Ford Foundation of West Africa in Nigeria: the National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Lagos Nigeria, and the National Gallery also Lagos. Regarding the latter, she wrote The High Report: The National Gallery of Art, Nigeria/A General Condition Assessment. Discussion of her art is included in Lisa Farrington’s Creating Their Own Images and Robert Henkes’ The Art of Black American Women: works of Twenty-Four Artists of the Twentieth Century, among other sources. In April 2011, she was awarded the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award at UW-Madison.