My Anita Glass Memorial Lecture at Brown University, Oct. 15, 2021 @ 5:50PM EST

Anita Glass Memorial Lecture: Chika Okeke-Agulu

Friday, October 15, 2021 at 5:30 pm

El Anatsui, Rising Sea, 2019.  Photo courtesy Haus der Kunst

 

The Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Brown University is honored to announce that poet, curator, blogger and art historian Chika Okeke-Agulu will present the 2021 Anita Glass Lecture on October 15 at 5:30 pm in List Art Building on the Brown campus. He will discuss the work of Ghanian-born artist El Anatsui, one of Africa’s most celebrated contemporary sculptors.

In March 2019 Professor Okeke-Agulu co-curated El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale at the Haus der Kunst Museum in Munich - perhaps the largest solo show of a black African artist in Europe.  Okeke-Agulu’s talk, "El Anatsui's Metamorphic Objects," will discuss the show, while also examining the ontological and epistemic orders that inform our understanding of El Anatsui's shape-shifting, monumental metal sculptures.

Okeke-Agulu is Professor of African and African Diaspora Art at Princeton University. His recent books include Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in 20th-Century Nigeria (2015), Obiora Udechukwu: Line. Image. Text (2018), and Yusuf Grillo: Painting. Lagos. Life (2020). 

 

About Professor Chika Okeke-Agulu 

Chika Okeke-Agulu was born in Umuahia in Nigeria in 1966. As an artist, he has had three solo exhibitions, five joint exhibitions, and twenty-eight group exhibitions in England, Germany, Nigeria, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Trindad and Tobago, and the United States. His work is in the collections of the Newark Museum, Iwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth, and the National Council for Arts and Culture, Lagos.

As a scholar, Professor Okeke-Agulu’s books include YusufGrillo: Painting. Lagos. Life (Skira Editore, 2020), ObioraUdechukwu: Line, Image, Text (Skira Editore, 2016); PostcolonialModernism:    Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-CenturyNigeria (Duke, 2015); and (with Okwui Enwezor), Contemporary African Art Since 1980 (Damiani, 2010). He is co-editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art and maintains the blog Ọfọdunka and has written for HuffPost.  He has co-organized several art exhibitions, including El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale (Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2019), Who Knows Tomorrow (Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2010), 5th Gwangju Biennale (Gwangju, 2004), The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945 1994 (Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, 2001), Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa (Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1995), and the Nigerian section at the First Johannesburg Biennale, 1995.

Among Professor Okeke-Agulu’s many awards and prizes are: Honorable Mention, The Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publication (triennial) Award (Arts Council of African Studies Association, 2017); The Melville J. Herskovits Prize for the most important scholarly work in African Studies published in English during the preceding year (African Studies Association, 2016); and the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism (College Art Association, 2016). Okeke-Agulu serves on the advisory boards of the Hyundai Tate Research Centre, the Tate Modern, London, and The Africa Institute, Sharjah, and on the Advisory Council of Mpala Research Centre, Nanyuki, Kenya. He is on the executive board of Princeton in Africa, and the editorial board of the Journal of Visual Culture.