Dr. Chika Okeke-Agulu, professor of Art and Archeology at Princeton University, is an Igbo-Nigerian artist, art historian, art curator, and blogger specializing in African and African Diaspora Art History. He is widely published in art and scholarly journals on classical, modern, and contemporary African art history and theory. His books include Contemporary African Art Since 1980; Phyllis Galembo: Maske; and Ezumeezu: Essays on Nigerian Art and Architecture. He is editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, by Duke University Press. His most recent publication, which he is joining us to discuss, is Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria from Duke University Press.
Friday October 23rd, 2:00 – 4:00 PM, Rm. 5414
Light refreshments served
Joshua I. Cohen and Abigal Lapin Darsdashti will be responding to Chika Okeke-Agulu’s talk.
Joshua I. Cohen (B.A. Vassar College, Ph.D. Columbia University) is an Africanist art historian specializing in 20th-century cross-cultural exchange. His areas of interest include African and diasporic modernisms; national post-independence cultural policies in West Africa; international “ballet” performance; “primitivism” in art practice and discourse; postcolonial studies; and museum studies. His first book-length project tracks European and then African modernist engagements with African sculpture between 1905 and 1980. A second project builds on research conducted in Guinea and elsewhere since 2002, examining international staged productions of West African dance, music, theater, and masquerade.
Abigail Lapin Dardashti is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on formations of ethno-religious and racial identity in the Americas, with a concentration on the Dominican Republic and Brazil. Her dissertation explores the relationship of race, politics, and modernity during the Afro-Brazilian civil rights movement in the mid-twentieth century. Her work has been funded by the Smithsonian Institution and the New York Council of the Humanities. Lapin Dardashti is a Graduate Teaching Fellow at City College, CUNY.
The Postcolonial Studies Group (PSG) is a student-run organization chartered by the Doctoral Students’ Council (DSC) at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
This event is co-sponsored by the Institution for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas (IRADAC) and the Africana Studies Group (ASG).
