Exhibition Lecture: The American Negro Artist Looks at Africa: Art Historian James A. Porter and African Diaspora Art Histories by Dr. Earnestine Jenkins

Dr. Earnestine Jenkins, Guest Curator, Black Artists in America: From Civil Rights to the Bicentennial, Professor, Department of Art, University of Memphis

Artist, scholar, educator and writer, James A. Porter (1905- 1970), was a seminal figure in African American art history. Porter’s Modern Negro Art (1943), covering Black artists from slavery to the early twentieth century, remains the foundational text in the field. Less familiar, however, are the decades of research in the Caribbean, South America and Africa, exploring connections between artists of African descent. This lecture will discuss James Porter as a pioneering scholar in the evolving focus area of African Diaspora art histories.