African Diaspora

Panel Title: Arts of Africa and the African Diaspora

Chair: Felicia Mings, Curator, Art Gallery of York University

Panelists: Sarah Richter, PhD Candidate University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and Visiting Professor, Georgia Southern University

sarahd.richter@gmail.com

Frederica Simmons, Curatorial Department Assistant Minneapolis Institute of Art

fsimmons@artsmia.org

Amy M. Nygaard Mickelson, Ph.D., Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Art History at the University of St. Thomas

nyga0002@stthomas.edu

Abstracts:

Sarah Deanne Richter

Spectacular Procession: Rediscovering Freedom in Dread Scott's Slave Rebellion Reenactment

From November 8-9 in 2019, artist and activist Dread Scott gathered three hundred people to reenact and reimagine the forgotten German Coast Uprising of 1811. Almost relegated to historical obscurity, this slave revolt was organized by small groups of individuals who clandestinely met with other sells along the river parishes just outside of New Orleans. With little bloodshed, the German Coast Uprising was not as well documented as other uprisings such as Nat Turner’s rebellion in Virginia. The impetus for the re-enactment in 2019 created a historical tension, a spectacle of the past in the present as they walked twenty-six miles past mcmansions, strip malls, and highways. Scott created this army of the descendants of enslaved Africans who fought not only for their lives, but for their freedom. For Scott and the reenactors, this was an embodied performance that opened the possibility of multiple futures and freedoms still yet to be achieved.

Frederica Simmons

I Will Be A Witness: Bessie Harvey and Alternative Legacies in American Feminist Art

Albeit the rise of fourth wave feminism in the late 1980s onward has brought about greater awareness regarding the concepts of privilege and intersectionality, the early failures of white feminists to fully embrace Black women in the Suffrage Movement set the tone for future decades of exclusion that continue to permeate the movement today. Feminist art historical approaches establish barriers of their own through the manner that art deemed to be “feminist” is identified, failing to challenge the favoring of academic and formally trained artists, thus creating extensively exclusionary boundaries. This deeply flawed methodology reinforces sentiments established against autodidact artists, often given the misnomer vernacular, who are excluded from art historical record and deemed to be outside academic tradition. The marginalization of Black autodidact artists from the art historical record diminishes and devalues the contributions of Black American sculptor Bessie Harvey (1929-1994).

Harvey is an unconventional and wholly unrecognized parallel figure to the feminist art movement of the late 20th century. Fiercely proud of her ancestral heritage, Harvey seeks often to inculcate her diasporic legacy into her artworks while maintaining her contemporary identity and challenging the limitations of the white patriarchy. Through the sharing of the critical biographical and object analysis that connects Harvey’s practice to historically female-empowering cultures and ideologies, this research addresses the canonical failure to see the full complexity and sophistication of her work, instead radically embracing her within the canon as the Black feminist artist she has always been.

Amy M. Nygaard Mickelson

Exhibiting the Post-Colonial Grotesque: Jane Alexander’s African Adventure and Ethnographic Dioramas

Contemporary South African artist Jane Alexander’s site-specific installation, African Adventure: The British Officers’ Mess, The Castle of Good Hope (1999-2002), features a complex tableau of eleven sculptural figures intermixed with found materials. Originally, Alexander’s artwork was installed in South Africa’s Castle of Good Hope, the Cape’s oldest surviving colonial fortress built by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) between 1666-1679. Alexander’s installation mimics the presentational form of natural history dioramas while challenging the Castle’s post-apartheid transformation from colonial bastion to tourist destination. I argue that the artist’s intervention puts into play the complex markers of settler/colonial domination with ethnographic and pseudoscientific displays of people. Used as ontological devices, ethnographic dioramas served as exportable visual and intellectual arguments to justify European colonialism and imperialism in southern Africa as well as the global south. In fact, a whole profitable industry developed around the physical display of so-called “primitives” vis-à-vis human trafficking for world fairs, ethnographic expositions, and amusement troupes. A close examination of Alexander’s combinatory human/animal sculptures reveals how the post-colonial grotesque pries open culturally constructed boundaries while drawing viewers into an interstitial space where they grapple with form and meaning. Thus, by mimicry of ethnographic dioramas, such as the South African Museum’s former “Bushman” diorama, Alexander’s African Adventure wields the Castle’s colonial identity against itself.