Cancelled African Modernism in America – In-Person

Date: 03-17-2024
Time: 12:00pm to 2:30pm
Tuition (includes exhibit admission):
$35 Non Taft Museum Member
$25 Current Taft Museum Member
Open to: All Genders 16+

Participants will engage in a docent-led tour of the exhibit, after which facilitator Ashley Ferguson will lead a circle for all to reflect on their experience with the art through intentional writing, listening, and sharing. New and experienced writers are welcome. Bring your favorite writing materials or use supplies provided. Registration required.

Payment due at time of registration. Limited to 20 participants.
Please note: We cannot process refunds for this program.
**Please arrive inside the Taft Museum by 11:45am so that you can be directed to the gathering location for the event.**

From the Taft Museum’s Exhibit Description

African Modernism in America features more than 60 dynamic and vivid works of art created in Africa during the 1950s and ‘60s. Co-organized by the American Federation of Arts and Fisk University Galleries, the exhibition explores the relationships formed between African artists and American patrons, artists, and cultural organizations amid the interlocking histories of civil rights, decolonization, and the Cold War. Many of the paintings, sculptures, and works on paper in the show were drawn from Fisk’s remarkable collection of gifts from the Harmon Foundation.

Showing African art in the United States rooted it in the present and encouraged American audiences to engage with African artists as contemporaries. The inventive nature of the works in this exhibition challenges the assumptions of the time about African art being isolated to a “primitive past.” Some pieces took inspiration from early Christian art, West African sculpture, and Nigerian literature, while others reflect the influences of American jazz and modern European art.

(Image: Peter Clarke (South African, 1929–2014), That Evening Sun Goes Down (detail), 1960, gouache on paper, 21 1/2 x 17 in. Fisk University Galleries, Nashville, Gift of the Harmon Foundation, 1991.313. © 2022 Peter Edward Clarke / DALRO, Johannesburg / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy American Federation of Arts. Funding for the conservation of this artwork was generously provided through a grant from the Bank of America Conservation Project)