Joseph L Underwood
Biographic Data
| ID | 5455841 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joseph L Underwood |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joseph L |
| FAMILY NAME | Underwood |
| SIGNATURE | UNDERWOOD J L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Independent Dance |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 8 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 8 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Arts across Africa before 1600
In Cape Town, one of the origins of art sits in a gallery hidden within a winding exhibition on humanity geared at children at the Iziko South African Museum. Not much larger than a modern marker pen, a chunk of ochre found in the Blombos Cave bears gridded lines that testify to an unknown person's decisive mark-making some 73,000 years ago (Fig. 1). The so-called Lydenburg heads (ImiKrolo yeetNtloko yaseLydenburg), impressively scaled works scul…
Contemporary Mythos of Spirits and Genies
all photos by Ibrahima ThiamIbrahima Thiam (b. 1976, Saint-Louis) uses his camera to simultaneously archive and reimagine the rich history of his home country of Senegal. With projects ranging from repurposing “found” photos from colonial-era studio photographers, to street interventions, to staged encounters with local deities, Thiam's photography responds to the history of the medium and deploys it to safeguard spaces, beliefs, and icons that m…
Abstract Minded
How much responsibility does the curator have to present a framework for the pieces on display, and when does she run the risk of over-explanation? Is the “curator” the person who leveraged connections to get the work on display, or the person who assembles a group of artworks that enlighten the viewer on a heretofore unknown/misunderstood topic? These aren't new questions in the field of exhibition-making, but they were certainly on my mind as I…
Biennials
Who's in and who's out? Central or peripheral? Market-driven tourism or anti-institutional experiment? The biggest mistake in analyzing the tangled network of biennials would be to simplify their motives and effects into such reductive binaries. Biennials are notoriously layered events, with many pop-up, OFF, collateral, or dissident exhibition projects taking place in tandem with the official event structured by the government, museum, foundatio…
Tendances et Confrontations
This article traces the presence, employment, and significance of the terms moderne and contemporain as used by organizers, artists, and critics of the 1966 Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres. Coupled with analyses of the great variety of artwork on display in Tendances et Confrontations, the exhibition of modern and/or contemporary art at the festival, this study demonstrates how the innovative paintings by modernists from Africa and the Diaspora …
El Hadji Sy
Beyond a traditional exhibition catalogue, El Hadji Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics offers not only the typical curatorial/contextual essays, but also the original source materials pertaining to this pioneering artist. In fact, the publication's greatest contribution might be its assemblage of archival photographs, posters, invitations, newspaper clippings, handwritten letters, and other ephemera related to Sy's career. These accompany the su…
Art, Honor, and Ridicule
Art, honor, and ridicule are the three lenses through which a viewer might read the messages stitched onto the surface of each asafo flag. Particularly popular among international audiences over the last forty years, asafo flags (frankaa) derived their form from European flags that decorated forts and vessels since the fifteenth century. Curated by Silvia Forni, this exhibition was constructed on field research ranging from 1974 to 2015 but also …
The Unfolding of a Biennale
Tendances et Confrontations
This article traces the presence, employment, and significance of the terms moderne and contemporain as used by organizers, artists, and critics of the 1966 Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres. Coupled with analyses of the great variety of artwork on display in Tendances et Confrontations, the exhibition of modern and/or contemporary art at the festival, this study demonstrates how the innovative paintings by modernists from Africa and the Diaspora …
The Unfolding of a Biennale
Tendances et Confrontations
This article traces the presence, employment, and significance of the terms moderne and contemporain as used by organizers, artists, and critics of the 1966 Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres. Coupled with analyses of the great variety of artwork on display in Tendances et Confrontations, the exhibition of modern and/or contemporary art at the festival, this study demonstrates how the innovative paintings by modernists from Africa and the Diaspora …
El Hadji Sy
Beyond a traditional exhibition catalogue, El Hadji Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics offers not only the typical curatorial/contextual essays, but also the original source materials pertaining to this pioneering artist. In fact, the publication's greatest contribution might be its assemblage of archival photographs, posters, invitations, newspaper clippings, handwritten letters, and other ephemera related to Sy's career. These accompany the su…
Art, Honor, and Ridicule
Art, honor, and ridicule are the three lenses through which a viewer might read the messages stitched onto the surface of each asafo flag. Particularly popular among international audiences over the last forty years, asafo flags (frankaa) derived their form from European flags that decorated forts and vessels since the fifteenth century. Curated by Silvia Forni, this exhibition was constructed on field research ranging from 1974 to 2015 but also …
Abstract Minded
How much responsibility does the curator have to present a framework for the pieces on display, and when does she run the risk of over-explanation? Is the “curator” the person who leveraged connections to get the work on display, or the person who assembles a group of artworks that enlighten the viewer on a heretofore unknown/misunderstood topic? These aren't new questions in the field of exhibition-making, but they were certainly on my mind as I…
Biennials
Who's in and who's out? Central or peripheral? Market-driven tourism or anti-institutional experiment? The biggest mistake in analyzing the tangled network of biennials would be to simplify their motives and effects into such reductive binaries. Biennials are notoriously layered events, with many pop-up, OFF, collateral, or dissident exhibition projects taking place in tandem with the official event structured by the government, museum, foundatio…
Contemporary Mythos of Spirits and Genies
all photos by Ibrahima ThiamIbrahima Thiam (b. 1976, Saint-Louis) uses his camera to simultaneously archive and reimagine the rich history of his home country of Senegal. With projects ranging from repurposing “found” photos from colonial-era studio photographers, to street interventions, to staged encounters with local deities, Thiam's photography responds to the history of the medium and deploys it to safeguard spaces, beliefs, and icons that m…
Arts across Africa before 1600
In Cape Town, one of the origins of art sits in a gallery hidden within a winding exhibition on humanity geared at children at the Iziko South African Museum. Not much larger than a modern marker pen, a chunk of ochre found in the Blombos Cave bears gridded lines that testify to an unknown person's decisive mark-making some 73,000 years ago (Fig. 1). The so-called Lydenburg heads (ImiKrolo yeetNtloko yaseLydenburg), impressively scaled works scul…
Art (6 works) · Art history (5 works) · Visual arts (5 works) · African history and culture studies (4 works) · Exhibition (4 works) · The arts (4 works) · Computer Science (3 works) · History (3 works) · Literature (3 works) · Painting (3 works)