[Kunst Afrikas] Research Colloquium for the Arts of Africa | LEON WAINWRIGHT: British Art and the Caribbean: Mid-century Dynamics (2.5.2023, 18:15-19:45, online via Webex)

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Dear students, colleagues and friends of the Colloquium for the Arts of Africa,

The next session of our colloquium will take place online on Tuesday, May 2, 2023 from 18:15-19:45. We look forward to welcome there Leon Wainwright, professor at the Open University and specialist in Caribbean Art History in Great Britain. We cordially invite you and interested guests to the lecture. Everybody is welcome!

LEON WAINWRIGHT
'British Art and the Caribbean: Mid-century Dynamics'

May 2, 2023 at 18.15
Online via Webex: https://fu-berlin.webex.com/fu-berlin/j.php?MTID=maffcb7144105d2dfdeb571bfcfff013c (Meeting-Kennnummer: 2734 842 7671, Über Videosystem beitreten: Wählen Sie 27348427671@fu-berlin.webex.com<mailto:27348427671@fu-berlin.webex.com>; Über Telefon beitreten: +49-619-6781-9736 Germany Toll, +49-89-95467578 Germany Toll 2, Zugriffscode: 2734 842 7671)

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Aubrey Williams 'Earth II', 1962, oil on canvas, 127 x 102 cm. Courtesy of the Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź.
The paintings of Aubrey Williams (1926-1990) occupy several different narratives at once in the history of art. One narrative is about the role of people of African descent in the development of artistic modernism. Another is about Williams's birthplace, Guyana, and where the artist lived, worked or exhibited - such as in Jamaica, Italy and the United States. A story that is yet to be understood more fully is the evolution of British painting in the mid-twentieth century. This presentation will examine how Williams contributed to it and it will extend a look at one of his contemporaries, the British Guiana-born artist Frank Bowling (b.1934). It will attempt to explain the process by which a community of migrant artists and gallerists living in Britain after the Second World War came to interact with others from around the world, namely the Commonwealth and Poland, in a distinctively 'outernational' story of art which foreshadowed the identity-based groupings of artists in Britain from the late 1960s. With reference to an expanded geography of the lives and works of Caribbean artists, the presentation will explore this new picture of the mid-century dynamics in British art, taking into view recent displays of works by Williams and Bowling in the collection of the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź.

About the Colloquium for the Arts of Africa:
The colloquium invites researchers, artists, curators, and activists to present different critical approaches to cross-cultural knowledge transfer in the arts at this very moment in history to our student body and teaching staff. The colloquium is an (online) forum to debate current research and work in progress that is sensitive to hegemony and power relations in artistic and academic networks. https://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/khi/schwerpunkte/abteilung_afrika/Kolloquium/index.html

With kind regards,
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
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