Mikelle Smith Omari-Tunkara Will Give Hohenberg Lecture Feb. 19 at the U of M

For release: February 11, 2010
For press information, contact Simone Wilson, 901-678-4164

Mikelle Smith Omari-Tunkara

 Omari-Tunkara is a leading scholar in the art of Africa and the African Diaspora, as well as African-American art and culture. She has lectured internationally and written extensively about permutations of ancestral Africa in the African Diaspora, gender, art, power, and contemporary African Art. Her most recent single-authored book is Manipulating the Sacred: Yoruba Art, Ritual, and Resistance in Brazilian Candomble.

Her lecture, “Global/Local: Contemporary Art in Africa and Its Diasporas” will focus on the new directions that conceptualizations of the African Diaspora are taking. “For African art historians and others, African Diaspora specifies the coerced distribution of African peoples to Asia, Europe, and the Americas,” Omari-Tunkara said. “However, many scholars and curators of African art continue to have preconceived definitions of contemporary art of Africa and its Diasporas and try to fit it into a single, hegemonic and monolithic mold with African-American USA as its center.”

Focusing on selected works by African artists living in and working out of Africa, Brazil, Cuba, and Europe, including the painting Gap Junction II by German-African artist Daniel Kojo Schrade, Omari-Tunkara will explore issues of identity and preconceived or implied identity.

For more information, call 901-678-4164.