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Dia Center for the Arts press release 4/1/95
ROBERT LEHMAN LECTURES ON CONTEMPORARY ART:
ROBERT FARRIS THOMPSON
SCRIPTS OF THE SPIRIT: AFRICAN IDEOGRAMS IN WORLD ART HISTORY
As part of the Robert Lehman Lectures on Contemporary Art
Robert Farris Thompson will lecture on the work of Frédéric
Bruly Bouabré at Dia Center for the Arts, 548 West 22nd
Street, New York City, on Thursday, June 22, 1995. The lecture, entitled
"Scripts of the Spirit: African Ideograms in World Art History,"
will begin at 6:30 p.m. Admission is $5.00.
This lecture is organized in conjunction with the exhibition
"Worlds Envisioned:
Alighiero e Boetti and Frédéric Bruly Bouabré,"
at Dia's main exhibition facility, 548 West 22nd Street, on view
through June 25, 1995. Selected in consultation with the artists,
the show highlights the two artists' affinities: both may be described
as cosmographers, individuals with an encyclopedic curiosity about
the world, and a fascination with the systems, codes and schemata
by which such knowledge is recorded, archived, coded, and classified.
Professor Thompson will focus on the work of the Ivorian artist
Frédéric Bruly Bouabré.
Professor Thompson is Master of Timothy Dwight College at Yale
University and Professor of African and Afro-American art history
at the same institution. His most recent book, Face of the
Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americas, (1993),
is a comparative study of Afro-Atlantic altars. Tracing icons
and philosophies in altar making from major African civilizations
to the Americas, the book restores many works of art, long considered
in isolation from each other, to their original constellating
power. Other publications include Black Gods and Kings
(1971), African Art and Motion (1974), The Four Moments
of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds (1981), Flash of the
Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (1983).
His articles have been anthologized in more than fourteen books
and he has designed and organized five major exhibitions of African
and Afro-American art.
Funding for the lecture series has been provided by a generous
grant from the Robert Lehman Foundation, Inc. Funding for "Worlds
Envisioned: Alighiero e Boetti and Frédéric Bruly
Bouabré" was received from the Lannan Foundation and
the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, Washington,
D.C. Additional funding was provided by the members of the Dia
Art Council, the major annual support group of Dia Center for
the Arts, and the Dia Art Circle.
For information, please contact Melissa Goldstein at (212) 989-5566
Fax: (212) 989-4055
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