Black History Month: Art Matters Lecture with Joan Kee
Starting off Black History Month I attended the lecture by Joan Kee PhD, JD on “The Geometries of Afro Asia: Art beyond Solidarity,” on Friday, February 2, the Art Matters series at SB Museum of Art. Kee is a Professor of Art History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The lecture title, the same as her new book (University of California Press, 2023), was the structure for the engaging lecture.
Kee postulates that art challenges the global majority view of the world. Raising both questions and the bar on one’s perceptions, the art and relationships formed between Black and Asian artists at critical historical moments bring us more information than political leaders and the media.
Starting with how Afro Asia is geographically understood, she compared three world maps: the Asian African Conference, Bandung, Indonesia 1955 map, the Brandt Line North-South 1980 map, and the AuthaGraph map by Hajime Narukawa 1999/2015. Narukawa took the globe spherical view and realigned it via geometry. The map keeps the sizes of all continents and oceans while it reduces the distortions of their shapes like a Dymaxion map does and can be tiled in any direction without seams. The map projection tries to reflect an infinite perspective of the world.
Kee stated, “Geography itself is unfixed. Asia and Africa used to be depicted to the public as uninhabitable and places to be conquered, yet the art shows us differently. Artists were joined by an interest to learn about other parts of the world, and defined set cultural interconnections. Artwork is allowed to exceed what politics says we can’t.”
She presented selected art works from the 1600s through 2013 for their historical juxtaposition with world events. The art highlighted a range of diverse intermingling of cultural, social, and political situations of Afro Asian peoples.
Most famously impactful is the 1968 photograph of Kathleen Cleaver, at the Black Panther Party office San Francisco, CA, standing in front of a Chinese poster by Cao Youcheng whose title is, “Firmly Support US Black People’s Just Struggle against Racial Discrimination”. The photo was taken by Alan Copeland. Here, one notes the Chinese statement that the Black struggle is a global struggle.
Other works discussed were Jaspar Beckx, Dom Miguel de Castro, c. 1643; Archita Ricci, Portrait of Hasekura Tsunenaga, c.1615; William H. Johnson, For India and China, c. 1944-1945; Marc Riboud, photos of wife Barbara Chase-Riboud in Mongolia; Chinese artists Biduan Wu and Shangyi Jin’s Chairman Mao Standing with People of Asia, Africa and Latin America, c.1961; and Howardena Pindell’s, Autobiography: East/West (Gardens), c. 1963.
In concluding the lecture, Kee showed a clip from the 2013 Studio CAMP film titled, From Gulf to Gulf. She then fielded questions from the audience, and suggested that additional artists to study on Afro Asian art are Alexandre Keto who inspires students to explore their African Roots, and Kandis Williams on contemporary critical theory including racial-nationalism, authority, and eroticism.
Kee shared her next book is on emojis, “I just have to do it.” She has been submitting a request for a kimchi emoji with Unicode annually for nine years and will continue till it is accepted. She is also working on a script for a six-episode TV series on MoMA.
Kee is a contributing editor at Artforum, an editor at large for the Brooklyn Rail, and on the advisory boards of Art History, the Oxford Art Journal, Modernism/modernity, and Art Margins.
Generous support for Art Matters is provided by the SBMA Women’s Board.
