ADAMA Arts Salon Episode 64
In connection to ADAMA's upcoming exhibition, Patacones, Paintbrushes, and Power. Opening September 5th the exhibit will highlight the Taller Portobelo Art Colony and residency alumni. The Arts Salon episode will feature Dr. Fahamu Pecou in conversation with Dr. Arturo Lindsay and Dr. Rene Alexander Craft.
About moderator: Dr. Fahamu Pecou is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar whose works combine observations on hip-hop, fine art, and popular culture to address concerns around contemporary representations of Black men. Through paintings, performance art, and academic work, Dr. Pecou confronts the performance of Black masculinity and Black identity, challenging and expanding the reading, performance, and expressions of Blackness.
Dr. Renée Alexander Craft: A performance studies trained Black feminist writer, scholar, and educator Craft's research and teaching are animated by methods of oral history and ethnographic research. A professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Communication and Curriculum in Global Studies, she is director of the Southern Oral History Program. Broadly, her research and teaching examine the relationship among sociohistorical constructions of Blackness, Black cultural performance, and discourses of Black inclusion and exclusion within a hemispheric American framework. For nearly twenty-five years, her research has focused on an Afro-Latin community of Portobelo, Panama who call themselves and their carnival performance tradition “Congo.” She is the author of When the Devil Knocks: The Congo Tradition and the Politics of Blackness in 20th Century Panama and a digital humanities project titled Digital Portobelo: Art + Scholarship + Cultural Preservation (digitalportobelo.org). Titled Patacones, Paint Brushes, and Power: Historicizing an African Diaspora Arts Collective at the Crossroads of the Americas, Alexander Craft’s current research is a multi-model project that analyzes the impact of two linked African Diaspora artist retreats on a generation of prominent African American and Afro-Latin visual artists who participated in them between 1995 and 2015.
Dr. Arturo Lindsay: An artist/cultural investigator/educator whose work is informed by the scholarly research he conducts on African spiritual and aesthetic retentions, rediscoveries and re-inventions in America. His research findings are manifested in works of art, as well as books, scholarly essays and lectures.
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ADAMA Arts Salon is a series of conversations featuring contemporary artists, curators, scholars, and more from across the African Diaspora.