Press Items

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Nine Moments

Press

Antiquities Across Times and Place

Press

Artslant Magazine: 'Mint Tea, Gossip, and Celebration'

Wole Soyinka is someone to celebrate. Africa's most acclaimed writer, dramatist, poet, novelist, "writer of genius", politico activist who spent 22 months as prisoner of conscience and, for the most part has transcended negativity in a host of camps. He’s...
Soyinka

Harvard Crimson: 'Cooper Gallery Imbues Collecting with Storytelling'

Bathed in warm light, the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery’s newest exhibition, “Wole Soyinka: Antiquities Across Times and Place,” provides a critical take on a collector’s purpose. Slated to run through December 21, the show provides the setting for a series of...
Soyinka

i once knew a girl

Artslant: 'Carrie Mae Weems: I once knew a girl...'

In the sometime satin and velvet lined world of the visual arts, the impact of the socio-political affairs transmit messages against war, poverty, racism, injustice and imbalance. Some mimic, "art for art sake" in avoidance. Others charge in. Few peal...
Weems

Artslant: 'Doxology: Dell M. Hamilton's BLUES/BLANK/BLACK'

With the Christmas holiday rapidly approaching, a limited audience gathered at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art at Harvard University for a riveting performance of a work challenging issues of race, gender, violence and...
I ONCE KNEW A GIRL...

Big Red & Shiny: 'See It Before It’s Gone: Carrie Mae Weems'

A Zeus, a Jesus, a jester… or is it an evil clown? Actually, it’s President Barack Obama (yes, we can still call him that for a few more precious days)—seen through the lens (literally) of artist Carrie Mae Weems. “The Obama Project” (2016, video...
Weems

Harvard Gazette: 'Art of the self, but not just'

At a recent reception, an eager crowd followed MacArthur “genius” and 2015 W.E.B. Du Bois Medalist Carrie Mae Weems as she wound her way through the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art, stopping frequently to explain the thinking or...
Weems

Harvard Magazine: “Getting Out of the Way of the Work”

There’s a line out the Cooper Gallery’s doors, wrapping back around Peet’s. We’re queuing between those old-style red-velvet aisle markers, printed tickets in hand. When we finally make it inside, they make it worth our while: I sample some kind of...
Weems

Harlem

Color Magazine: 'Harlem: Found Ways'

With the exhibition Harlem: Found Ways, the Cooper Gallery presents artistic visions and engagements specific to Harlem, New York City, in the last decades. Each artwork employs a distinct set of inquiries and innovative strategies to explore the Harlem...
Harlem

Harvard Gazette: 'Images of Harlem, then and now'

For photographer Dawoud Bey, activism and art have long been linked. Bey, whose portraits of Harlem form the centerpiece of the exhibit “Harlem: Found Ways” now at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art, first connected with his...
Gazette image

Harvard Magazine: Finding Harlem

Vera Ingrid Grant, director of Harvard’s Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African-American Art, notes that the name “Harlem” evokes many different visions. Some people recall the landmarks central to the Harlem Renaissance, like the Apollo Theater...
Abigail DeVille’s New York at Dawn

Huffington Post: 'Harlem at Harvard'

Finally, there is the Ligon — a canvas that reminds one of nothing so much as a monolith tipped on its side, set grayly against a wall that barely abides it. That the 20-foot long painting is the terminus of Harlem: Found Ways, a recent presentation at...
Harlem

ReSignifications

Press

Boston Globe: 'Harvard's Cooper Gallery updates the blackamoor'

‘ReSignifications,” at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art, is a pointed object lesson. What can we learn from blackamoors, the servile black figures in art history? Thirty-six blackamoor statues, mostly made in the 18th and...
ReSignifications

Wicked Local Cambridge: 'Around Cambridge'

The Cooper Gallery’s spring 2018 exhibition “ReSignifications” links classical and popular representations of African bodies in European art, culture and history as it interprets and interrogates the “Blackamoor” trope in Western culture that emerged at...
ReSignifications

Art of Jazz: Form/Performance/Notes

Press

Artslant: 'Race, Art, and all that Jazz at Harvard'

Jazz is disobedient. Let’s start there. Born in America, long before being considered, "cool", or perhaps “hip”, it was something to be picked up with fingers, to be eaten by hand. Only later it worked its way into the global fabric, leaping across oceans...
Artslant

Boston Globe: 'Harvard Show Looks at Art in the Key of Jazz'

It’s a sensory paradox. Music is an aural art, yet the richer its sounds the more they can conjure up images. This relationship between seeing and hearing is central to “Art of Jazz: Form/Performance/Notes” at Harvard’s Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African...
Art of Jazz

Harvard Art Museums, INDEX: 'Variations on a Theme'

When it comes to the Art of Jazz: Form exhibition, on view in the Harvard Art Museums’ University Teaching Gallery, there’s much more than meets the eye. That’s because there are two other components to the show , both on view in the Ethelbert Cooper...
Art of Jazz

Harvard Gazette: 'Jazz Made Visible'

Crammed into a corner made by padded walls, hunched under a low tin ceiling, Max Roach smacked and rattled the drums while his feet rapidly tapped the pedals of the kick and hi-hat. A photographer captured the scene, at the Three Deuces, one of many small...
Art of Jazz

Harvard Magazine: 'In Art of Jazz, A Multivocal Exhibit'

In the front hall of the Cooper Gallery on Mount Auburn Street, what appear to be two bubble-shaped lanterns hang from the ceiling—but instead of beaming down light to illuminate the art, they pipe in music for visitors standing beneath. In the rooms...
Art of Jazz

The Root: '10 Female Artists of Color on the Rise'

A Liberian conceptual painter, Lina Iris Viktor grew up in London. She is known for working with 24-karat gold and using only the colors blue, black and white. Her work consists of simple geometric shapes that repeat throughout the canvas, and in many...
Lina

THE WOVEN ARC

Press

Black Chronicles II

Press

Artscope: A Critical Look at Black Photographic History

When the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art opened last fall in Harvard Square, just behind Peet’s Coffee, I was overjoyed, since there’s now somewhere in the square one can enter and leave with rich takings without being followed...
BC2

Boston Globe: 'Black and white photographs of Victorian England'

Not all of these images are of the everyday sort, but the fact that so many are seems far more exotic than the subjects’ skin color. We see married couples, men in uniform, a black butler and white maid (with their white employers), two bishops, a...
Black Chronicles II

Harvard Crimson: 'Artist Spotlight, Jay Calderin'

As an author, designer, and professor, Calderin was invited to speak on 19th-century black fashion as part of the Cooper Gallery’s new exhibit, “Black Chronicles II,” which feature photographs of various subjects from artists to royalty. Prior to his Nov...
Calderin

Harvard Gazette: 'Life behind the Pose'

“We are not what we seem.” When the iconic novelist Richard Wright wrote those words, in 1940, he was describing the African-American experience. As a stunning new exhibit at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery shows, the complexity of seeing and identity took...
Black Chronicles II

Harvard Magazine: 'Existence as Resistance'

“Guess who was the most photographed American of the nineteenth century.” Fletcher University Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Studies, prepares for the surprise on my face.
BC2

Diago: The Pasts of This Afro-Cuban Present

Press

Africanah.org: 'Juan Roberto Diago'

Slavery is in Cuba’s past, but, as in the United States, its legacy continues. That is the ongoing career theme of mixed-media artist Juan Roberto Diago, who will exhibit 25 pieces in “Diago: The Pasts of This Afro-Cuban Present,” a career retrospective...
My Race My History

Art on Cuba: 'Los pasados de este presente afrocubano'

La exposición reúne unas 25 obras en técnica mixta e instalaciones que trazan la trayectoria de Juan Roberto Diago desde mediados de la década de 1990, cuando comenzó a construir, a través de su arte, una historia alternativa de Cuba, desde una...
Picture By: Alejandro de la Fuente

Big Red & Shiny: 'Issues of Power: Resilience and Healing'

Curated by Alejandro de la Fuente, Diago: The Past of This Afro-Cuban Present at The Cooper Gallery presents Juan Roberto Diago Durruthy’s first retrospective. Diago’s work is expository; a knowledge producer, Diago reconstructs a new history of the Afro...
ISSUES OF POWER: Resilience and Healing

Cuban Art News: '2017 Preview: Cuban Art in US Museums'

Diago: The Pasts of This Afro-Cuban Present. Some 25 mixed-media and installation works trace the career of Juan Roberto Diago from the mid-1990s, when he began to construct, through his art, a history of Cuba from an Afro-Cuban perspective.
Diago

Cuban Art News: 'Preview: Juan Roberto Diago at Harvard'

Tomorrow evening, the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at Harvard University welcomes Diago: The Pasts of This Afro-Cuban Present. Juan Roberto Diago and the show’s curator, Alejandro de la Fuente, spoke about the exhibition with...
Diago

Harvard Gazette: 'Shadows of Cuba’s past'

Slavery is in Cuba’s past, but, as in the United States, its legacy continues. That is the ongoing career theme of mixed-media artist Juan Roberto Diago, who will exhibit 25 pieces in “Diago: The Pasts of This Afro-Cuban Present,” a career retrospective...
Diago

Improper Bostonian: 'Diago: The Pasts of This Afro-Cuban Present'

After it appeared in the Cooper Gallery’s 2015 group exhibition Drapetomanía, Juan Roberto Diago saw his mixed-media piece Yo soy monte (I Am the Mountain) enter the Museum of Fine Arts’ permanent collection. A few years later, the 45-year-old Cuban...
Yo soy monte

On Cuba Magazine: 'Roberto Diago: «Yo soy mi raza, mi historia»'

El curador Alejandro de La Fuente y el artista plástico Juan Roberto Diago han logrado un acontecimiento sin precedentes: presentar en los predios de la Universidad de Harvard la muestra «Diago: Los pasados de este presente afrocubano» , una retrospectiva...
Roberto Diago: “Yo soy mi raza, mi historia”

Luminós/C/ity.Ordinary Joy

New York Times: 'A New Destination for African Art'

A few weeks before the revamped Harvard Art Museums reopened here, a new university-affiliated art space, the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art, made its debut in modest quarters, two former storefront offices off Harvard Square...
Luminosity

The Root: 'Exploring the City of the Mind Through African Art'

The Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art opened in late October 2014 in Cambridge, Mass., its exterior walls serving as both real and metaphoric grounding for the Hutchins Center for African and American Research at Harvard...
The Root Image