NYU Cities Collaborative and the Department of Art History are excited to announce the following guest speakers for the African Cities: Art and Architecture of Decolonization series, as part of Professor Prita Meier‘s Fall 2021 course.
All talks will take place via Zoom. Click here to launch the Zoom. Please note that this link should only be accessed at the time of the talk. No registration is required.
October 25, 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM: Moses Subiri, Independent curator, Hunter College and CCS Bard. “On the Aesthetics of Protest: Student Strikes at Makerere University, Revolution 3.0 Iconographies of Radical Change.” Click here for event page.
November 15, 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM: Zandi Sherman, Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Rutgers University. “Infrastructures and the Ontological Question of Race.” Click here for event page.
November 29, 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM: Menna Agha, School of Architecture and Urbanism, Carleton University. “Project Unsettled: Nubia Still Exists.” Click here for event page.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Prita Meier (PhD, Harvard University) is associate professor of African art and architectural history at New York University. Her research focuses African port cities and histories of transcontinental exchange and conflict. She is the author of Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere (Indiana University Press, 2016) and has publications in Art History, African Arts, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Artforum, and Arab Studies Journal, as well as contributions in several exhibition catalogs and edited books. Currently she is working on a new book about the social and aesthetic history of photography in Zanzibar and Mombasa and is co-organizing an exhibition and edited volume titled World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts Across the Indian Ocean (which received a 2016-17 NEH Humanities Projects grant). She has also held fellowships at the Clark Art Institute (2014-2015), Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities (2009-2010), Johns Hopkins University (2007-2009), and The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art (2017-18).
Zandi Sherman is an African feminist activist who devotes most of her energy to collectively imagining new ways of building queer African community. She has been involved in struggles for racial, gender and economic justice in both Johannesburg and Cape Town. She has also worked as a researcher for organizations working in popular education and queer media making and documentation.