Date: April 17, 2019
Location: NYU – Abu Dhabi
Paulette Young
Art historian RobertsonYoung Gallery, New York
Fashion Stories: Migration and Fashioning Identity in America
A Study of the designers Mimi Plange and Wunmi—New York’s fashion industry and the development of New York style have historically and are continually shaped by transnational migration. This paper explores the creative practice of two women designers of African descent whose work is shaped by their international migration experiences. Mimi Plange, Ghanaian born American women’s wear brand is inspired by African art, ritual and architecture. London-born, Lagos raised Wunmi, is a New York based performer and costume designer whose work is steeped in the style of Afrobeat and the Jamaican roots movement. Through oral histories, visual narratives and collected stories, these fashion designers contemplate how their personal journeys and life in New York have influenced their collections and brands. Clients share their fashion stories of acquiring and wearing Plange and Wunmi designs and describe their commitment to the brands.
Cheryl Finley
Cornell University
Contemporary Art of Migration: Joy Gregory’s Grand Tour
West Indian emigrants, such as Joy Gregory’s parents, traveled [to Europe] with the hope that both worlds might belong to them, the old and the new. They traveled in the hope that the mother country would remain true to her promise that she would protect the children of her empire. However, shortly after disembarkation the West Indian migrants of the fifties and sixties discovered that the realities of this new world were likely to be more challenging than they had anticipated. Over five months, Gregory traveled extensively in Belgium, Holland, France, Spain, Portugal, Cuba, Jamaica, Panama, Trinidad, Guyana, Surinam, and Haiti. Probing for evidence of the contemporary and colonial relationship between Europe and the Caribbean, she conducted interviews with people while collecting artifacts, recording sound, and photographing important sites of memory. One of the paradoxes Gregory noticed about the people she met in the Caribbean was their strong connection to, and affinity for, Europe as a motherland, despite the fact that many were the descendants of enslaved Africans forcibly brought by Europeans to the so-called new world to work the sugar cane, rice, and tobacco plantations. The fruits of their labors helped to build Europe while stripping the Caribbean and Africa of valuable natural and human resources. Today, many of the world’s poorest nations are located in these regions, including Haiti and Sierra Leone, to name just two. The continuing effects of the transatlantic slave trade and the subsequent ravages of colonial rule have ensured that the familial bond between Europe and the Caribbean is complicated, to say the least. On the one hand, Europe symbolizes the evil stepmother of the Cinderella fairytale; on the other hand, it represents the free, happily-everafter lifestyle that the handsome prince offers. Many Caribbean residents were lured to mother Europe during the postwar era with the promise of employment, better education, and the benefits of being at the epicenter of the empire, even in its decline. For those that remained in the Caribbean, Europe still represents a mythical, faraway place, a fantasyland and an unattainable dream, according to many of the people that Gregory interviewed. She asked them, “Where would you go, if you could?” Many responded with the name of a European country or city: England, France, Spain, and Portugal were the popular countries, while London, Paris, Venice, and Lisbon were the favored cities. The people that Gregory spoke to were very knowledgeable about Europe because of their colonial ties as well as from articles in the press, grade-school history and geography classes, and their relatives who have gone there within the past fifty years.
Sama Alshaibi
University of Arizona
Carry Over
My presentation will discuss the societal burden of unequal power relations between the West and the Middle East, and how that is articulated through photographs of women, particularly those made by Westerners. My latest photography project, Carry Over observes similarities between numerous historical Oriental portraits of MENA women and their contemporary counterparts now suggesting a chaotic existence under threat of displacement. For example, recent Associated Press photographs of Iraqi women standing in lines and stacking containers of petrol and dirty water on their heads reminds me of the shortages they face, yet reductive images fixated on their religious dress and head-coverings recall numerous historical photographs of women from the MENA region dressed in their ethnic attire while carrying vessels of water on their heads. In Carry Over, I restage elements of these photographs, including printing with historic Albumen processes, while disrupting the social exploitation of women’s relationship to security, home, and socio-economic through a feminist and postcolonial perspective.
Deborah Willis
New York University
Carrie Mae Weems’ Roaming Series
Carrie Mae Weems’s photographic “Roaming Series,” reflects on the contradictory instabilities introduced by forced migration, on the one hand, and the lack of mobility resulting from enslavement and incarceration, on the other. The artist’s own freedom and her resulting presence at the sites of imperial power activate memory and reveal the invisible human costs of state and imperial power. Weems’ 2006 Roaming series consists of large-scale photographs created in major locales in Europe as they reference imperial and colonial power. She explores the problems of representation and the interplay between the historical text and contemporary art practices that inform and translate views on gender and race today. By creating a visual memoir that looks at freedom and migration, Weems’ Roaming series is a search for counter-memories haunting classic European imperial sites. Noting and contesting inequities or absences, Weems thus establishes a presence and place for black women throughout the world and throughout history. Roaming is about seeing and being seen. It forces the viewer to see race often obscured or erased in museum exhibitions; beauty denied or accepted when considering the black female body; and potential of the black robed figure that guides us through rugged landscapes, pristine city views, and forbidden class structures.
