Kongo Carolina Kongo New Orleans: Where the High-Five Came From

Robert Farris Thompson, Thursday, April 7, 2011

4:30 pm, Porter Hall 100 (Gregg Hall)

Abatan: the life and art of an African artist and remarks on the greater Afro-Atlantic world. I will show how African art is total--sound, motion, song and gesture and how some of the main organizing principles of Yoruba worship are alive and well in the New World including New Orleans and Havana.

Robert Farris Thompson is the author of, among other works, Black Gods and Kings and African Art in Motion. He has been a Ford Foundation Fellow and has mounted major exhibitions of African art at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. He is Colonel John Trumbull Professor of the History at Art at Yale University where he was Master of Timothy Dwight College until 2010. His new book, Aesthetic of the Cool: Afro-Atlantic Art and Music, is being published by Periscope Ltd., located in Pittsburgh and distributed worldwide by Prestel.

Co-sponsored by the School of Art.

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