Enfilade

At the appearance of the first four volumes of a ten-volume series on the theme of The Image of the Black in Western Art, Harvard is hosting a symposium next week (largely focused on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). Volume III, Part 3: From the “Age of Discovery” to the Age of Abolition / The Eighteenth Century: Court, Enlightenment, Slavery, and Abolition is scheduled to be published next fall.

From the Harvard Art Museums website:

M. Victor Leventritt Symposium: The Image of the Black in Western Art
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 15 November 2010

"Portrait of a Black Boy," formerly attributed to Christopher Wren, 1680s (British Museum)

David Bindman, University College London and Harvard University; Paul Kaplan, State University of New York at Purchase; Joseph Koerner, Harvard University; Elmer Kolfin, University of Amsterdam; and Jeremy Tanner, University College London. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University, will moderate. Held in conjunction with the exhibition Africans in Black and White: Images of Blacks in 16th- and 17th-Century Prints, this symposium will feature five presentations followed by a panel discussion concerning the perception and representation of people of African descent in Western art.

Organized by the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research and David Bindman, Emeritus Professor of the History of Art, University College London, and a 2010 Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, with Anna Knaap, former Theodore Rousseau Postdoctoral Fellow, Division of European and American Art, Harvard Art Museums, and current Visiting Fellow, Jesuit Institute, Boston College. . . .