External links
- Yale website
- InIVA website
- "Previous Clark Prize Recipients", Clark Art Institute website
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Kobena Mercer (born 1960) [1] is a British art historian and writer on contemporary art and visual culture. His writing on Robert Mapplethorpe and Rotimi Fani-Kayode has been described as "among the most incisive (and delightful to read) critiques of simple identity-based politics in the field of cultural studies." [2]
Mercer was born in London in 1960. He was educated in Ghana and England and graduated with a bachelor's degree in Fine Art at Saint Martins School of Art. He gained his doctorate by completing a PhD at Goldsmiths College in 1990. [3]
Much of Mercer's writing has focused on the work and cultural context of black British artists, including monographs for Keith Piper, Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Hew Locke [4] – as well as on contemporary and modern art of the African Diaspora more widely. [5] He has contributed essays to numerous anthologies in the fields of cultural studies and contemporary art, including his own, groundbreaking volume, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies, published in 1994. [6] Mercer was commissioned to contribute "New Practices, New Identities: Hybridity and Globalization," the closing chapter in the epic series The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume V, The Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, 2014). [5]
In 2006, Mercer won the inaugural Clark Prize for excellence in art writing. [7] Alongside his work as a writer, Mercer also has a distinguished international career as an academic, teaching first at Middlesex University and, more recently, as Professor of History of Art and African American Studies at Yale. [3] It was announced in February 2021 that Bard College had appointed Mercer the Charles P. Stevenson Chair in Art History and the Humanities, and that he would assume the position in fall 2021. [8]
In 2023, Mercer received a PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award for Alain Locke & The Visual Arts (Yale University Press, 2022).
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Tongues Untied is a 1989 American experimental documentary film directed by Marlon T. Riggs, and featuring Riggs, Essex Hemphill and Brian Freeman. The film seeks, in its author's words to, "...shatter the nation's brutalizing silence on matters of sexual and racial difference."
Looking for Langston is a 1989 British black-and-white film, directed by Isaac Julien and produced by Sankofa Film & Video Productions. It combines authentic archival newsreel footage of Harlem in the 1920s with scripted scenes to produce a non-linear impressionistic storyline celebrating black gay identity and desire during the artistic and cultural period known as the Harlem Renaissance in New York. The film has a runtime of about 42 minutes.
Autograph ABP, previously known as the Association of Black Photographers, is a British-based international, non-profit-making, photographic arts agency.
Keith Piper is a British artist, curator, critic and academic. He was a founder member of the groundbreaking BLK Art Group, an association of black British art students, mostly based in the West Midlands region of the UK.
Gavin Jantjes is a South African painter, curator, writer and lecturer.
"Welcome to the Jungle" is a 1987 song by Guns N' Roses.
Iniva is the Institute of International Visual Art, a visual arts organisation based in London that collaborates with contemporary artists, curators and writers. Iniva runs the Stuart Hall Library, and is based in Pimlico, on the campus of Chelsea College of Arts.
Chief Victor Babaremilekun Adetokunboh Fani-Kayode, Q.C., SAN, CON (1921–1995) was a leading Nigerian politician, aristocrat, nationalist, statesman and lawyer. He was elected deputy premier of the Western Region of Nigeria in 1963 and he played a major role in Nigeria's legal history and politics from the late 1940s until 1995.
Rivington Place is a purpose-built international visual arts centre in Shoreditch, London.
Oluwarotimi Adebiyi Wahab Fani-Kayode was a Nigerian-born photographer, who moved to England at the age of 12 to escape the Nigerian Civil War. The main body of his work was created between 1982 and 1989. He explored the tensions created by sexuality, race and culture through stylised portraits and compositions.
Hew Donald Joseph Locke is a British sculptor and contemporary visual artist based in Brixton, London. In 2000 he won a Paul Hamlyn Award and the EASTinternational Award. He grew up in Guyana, but lived most of his adult life in London.
The Walther Collection is a private non-profit organization dedicated to researching, collecting, exhibiting, and publishing modern and contemporary photography and video art. The collection has two exhibition spaces: the Walther Collection in Neu-Ulm/Burlafingen, in Germany, and the Walther Collection Project Space in New York City.
Eddie Chambers is a British contemporary art historian, curator, artist and Department of Art and Art History professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
Alison Donnell is an academic, originally from the United Kingdom. She is Professor of Modern Literatures and Head of the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She was previously Head of School of Literature and Languages at the University of Reading, where she also founded the research theme "Minority Identities: Rights and Representations". Her primary research field is anglophone postcolonial literature, and she has been published widely on Caribbean and Black British literature. Much of her academic work also focuses questions relating to gender and sexual identities and the intersections between feminism and postcolonialism.
Mark Sealy is a British curator and cultural historian with a special interest in the relationship of photography to social change, identity politics and human rights. In 1991 he became the director of Autograph ABP, the Association of Black Photographers, based since 2007 at Rivington Place, a purpose-built international visual arts centre in Shoreditch, London. He has curated several major international exhibitions and is also a lecturer.
Roshini Kempadoo is a British photographer, media artist, and academic. For more than 20 years she has been a lecturer and researcher in photography, digital media production, and cultural studies in a variety of educational institutions, and is currently a professor in Photography and Visual Culture at the University of Westminster.
TEN.8 was a British photography magazine founded in 1979 and published quarterly in Birmingham, England, throughout the 1980s, folding in 1992.
Black British identity is the objective or subjective state of perceiving oneself as a black British person and as relating to being black British. Researched and discussed across a wide variety of mediums; the identity usually intersects with, and is driven by, black African and Afro-Caribbean heritage, and association with African diaspora and culture.
Catherine Oliaku Ugwu is a British executive producer, artistic director, and consultant working in large-scale ceremonies and events, including for the Summer and Winter Olympics, the Summer Paralympics, the Asian, European, Islamic Solidarity, and Commonwealth Games, and the Millennium Dome.
