Monday, March 25, 2024 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm
Dr. Lauren Taylor
125 Frick Fine Arts Auditorium
In 1966, the Musée Dynamique opened in Dakar as the first art museum to be constructed in Senegal following the nation’s independence from France. This talk reveals how the museum’s inaugural exhibition—Negro Art: Sources, Evolution, Expansion—deployed the arts of Africa as representations of kinship. This familial logic was imagined to sustain African solidarity but was also mobilized to justify continued French involvement in former West African colonies. By examining the multiple worldviews that associated African Art with filiality, this analysis illuminates the role of the continent’s arts institutions in transnational currents of thought, culture, and power.
Dr. Lauren Taylor is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History/ Program in African Studies at The Pennsylvania State University.