The Frye Art Museum and the Northwest African American Museum (NAAM) have partnered to develop a series of four lectures on the visual culture of the African continent and its diaspora. This series will explore the history and practice of artists of African descent, drawing connections between the African continent and its diaspora as the locus of Africanity. This is the second lecture of the series.

Mark Auslander, Ph.D., anthropologist and scholar of the Black Atlantic, presents a lecture examining African sculpture and other artifacts produced on the African continent during the early twentieth century and their introduction to Western audiences through museum exhibitions and publications in major European capitals.

ABOUT THE PRESENTER

Mark Auslander is the Associate Professor of Anthropology and Museum Studies at Central Washington University and the Director of the University’s Museum of Culture and Environment. He specializes in the study of the Black Atlantic and writes regularly on the art of that region. Auslander is the author of The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of Race and Finding an American Family (University of Georgia Press, 2011), winner of the 2010–12 Delmos Jones and Jagna Sharff Memorial Book Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of North America, and winner of the second book prize of the 2012 Victor Turner Ethnographic Writing Award from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology.