Hood Opens Exhibition on Black Womanhood

Public symposium will be held April 12

This spring, the Hood Museum of Art opens a major traveling exhibition that explores the historical roots of a charged icon in contemporary art—the black female body. Black Womanhood: Icons, Images, and Ideologies of the African Body, will be on view from April 1 through Aug. 10. The exhibition, organized by the Hood, will explore the complex perpetuation of icons and stereotypes of black womanhood through the display of over 100 sculptures, prints, postcards, photographs, paintings, textiles, and video installations by artists from Africa, Europe, America, and the Caribbean.

The exhibition will open with a lecture, “De/scribing Black Womanhood: Visual Narratives and the African Body,” by Barbara Thompson, curator of African, Oceanic, and Native American Collections, on Friday, April 11, at 4:30 p.m. in Loew Auditorium. A public symposium on the exhibition will be held the following day (Saturday, April 12) at the Hood. Walk-in registration begins at 9 a.m. and lectures and discussions continue until 4:30 p.m.

 “The exhibition provides the opportunity to raise awareness about the history of stereotypes of black womanhood and the continued impact they have not just on artists today, but on all of us living in the global community,” says Thompson.

Black Womanhood is funded by a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Hugh J. Freund '67, P'08, the William B. Jaffe and Evelyn A. Hall Fund, the Leon C. 1927, Charles L. 1955, and Andrew J. 1984 Greenbaum Fund, the Hanson Family Fund, and the William Chase Grant 1919 Memorial Fund. For more information, call 646-2808.

By SHARON REED

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