[Kunst Afrikas] Einladung in das Kolloquium zur Kunst Afrikas | NICOLE SMYTHE-JOHNSON: John Dunkley’s Subaltern Modernism (24.1.2023, 18 Uhr c.t. online)

[Mailingliste zur Kunst Afrikas <kunstafrikas@lists.fu-berlin.de>]

Liebe Studierende, liebe Mitglieder der Mailingliste,

sehr herzlich möchten wir Sie wieder in das Online-Kolloquium zur Kunst Afrikas einladen. Am kommenden Dienstag wird Nicole Smythe-Johnson – Freie Kuratorin und Kunsthistorikerin an der University of Texas – zu Gast sein. Wir laden Sie und alle interessierten Gäste sehr herzlich zu Vortrag und anschließender Diskussion ein.

Nicole Smythe-Johnson
John Dunkley’s Subaltern Modernism

Zeit: Dienstag, den 24.Januar 2023, 18 Uhr c.t.
Ort: online via Webex (https://fu-berlin.webex.com/fu-berlin/j.php?MTID=mbd1e1764a68dc6d8da860228feb5e26f)

Included in almost every major survey of Jamaican and Caribbean art, it’s difficult to overstate John Dunkley’s significance in Jamaican art history. Banana Plantation (1945), one of his best-known works, includes several elements typical of the artist’s distinctive oeuvre. The painting also brings together the three major themes of my dissertation: the assertion of a hemispheric American modernism defined by negotiations between elite and subaltern cultural production, the significance of circum-Caribbean travel in that vision of modernism, and the role of photography in perceiving that significance. The painting reflects on the often dangerous experiences of a generation of West Indian circum-Caribbean travelers whose working class cosmopolitanism shaped American modernity. Banana Plantation is also an example of Dunkley’s photographic eye—his consistently dark palette, flattened perspective and idiosyncratic handling of light, which I position as a kind of modernist formal innovation drawing on the new way of seeing that was early twentieth century photography.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen,
Celia Schmidt

Freie Universität Berlin
FB Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften
Kunsthistorisches Institut
Abteilung Kunst Afrikas
Sekretariat: Celia Schmidt, M.A.
Koserstr. 20 (A 3.08), 14195 Berlin
Telefon: +49-(0)30-838-55286, Fax: +49-(0)30-838-4-55286
kunstafrikas@zedat.fu-berlin.de<mailto:kunstafrikas@zedat.fu-berlin.de>