Conference Theme

1232007 Triennial Theme Statement: GLOBAL AFRICA

The theme of the 2007 Triennial Symposium on African Art emphasizes the place of African expressive arts in global contexts, encouraging panels and papers that address Africa's international and trans-cultural reach. In selecting this theme, we seek to foreground the ways in which Africa arts in all media draw from and contribute to global histories, cultures, and aesthetics. These global connections are particularly dramatic in the growing field of contemporary African art, in which artists study, exhibit, sell their work, and live all over the world. We also seek to draw attention to scholarship that is animating "traditional" practices, placing longstanding forms, techniques, and beliefs within the historical networks out of which they emerged.

While the impact of external forces on Africa has been the focus of much study, the Global Africa theme places equal emphasis on Africa's impact on non-African cultures. It also incorporates the globalization of conceptions of Africa, for the continent has long served as a trope for Western ideas about the exotic. What is the impact of such conceptions on African art and artists? And how has the exhibition and study of African art been affected by these popular (mis)conceptions?

Ogun shrine shared by Ade Ofunniyin and Yaw Shangofemi, Hawthorne Florida. Photograph, Ade Ofunniyin 2003

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