The Triennial Symposium upon African Art.

The Triennial Symposium upon African Art, organized by the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA), is the main forum bringing together scholars, educators, museum professionals, and artists whose focus is the visual and performance arts of Africa. Holding the Triennial in St Thomas in the U Virgin Islands last spring (April 25-29) highlighted the broadening liberty of our discipline, and scheduling it to coincide with Carnival emphasized the total experience of African art. It also meant that the official program, whose committee I chaired, faced tough competition from exciting festival affairs Yet most panels were self-same well attended.

We had forty-two panels, about the same number as for the previous meeting in recently made known Orleans. However, because we decided to last the symposium early on Saturday to enable participants to attend the Adult Parade, we had to schedule five associated panels at each session, as oppos to the four in recently made known Orleans (1998) and New York (1995) and merely two in Iowa (1992). The intimacy of past gatherings was sacrificed for the sake of the greater diversity of themes and interests Luckily the resort-like venue meant that there was ample opportunity for friendly interaction.

At previous Triennials many panels were focused onward a specific ethnic group or geographical region. The meeting in St Thomas included alone one ethnic-based panel. The shift to topics with a broad geographical or temporal intention signals a more mature phase in the progressive growth of our discipline, one that incorporates a comparative perspective that has many times been lacking in the contemplation of African art.

The Caribbean location called for an examination of the larger geographical distribution of African and African-derived artistic traditions. The conversation theme, "Transitions, Passages and Confluences: Exploring the Arts of Africa and the Diaspora," emphasized the dynamic nature of these traditions and unified the various threads that ran by the and of the numerous panels. The African vicinity in the arts of the fresh World is not a of the present day concern, but it had at no time been featured so prominently at a meeting organized according to ACASA, whose focus has been in succession the African continent. Topics ranged from "Yoruba Influences in African Diaspora Art" to "Atlantic Rim Performance Arts," the latter a order of succession of three panels organized through John Nunley and Robert Nicholls. Several presentations from that arrange as well as those of the panel "Crosstalk: Cultural and Artistic Influences across the Atlantic" (chaired through Michael D. Harris), moved beyond the familiar discussion of African "retentions" to exploration of an exciting arena of exchanges, where Caribbean and African American cultural practices are just as likely to influence the arts of the African continent as African ingredients are to appear in the modern World. For example, John Collins of the University of Ghana demonstrated that Caribbean musical influences are of considerable historical profundity in west Africa.

A number of panels dealing with Caribbean topics drew considerable participation from scholars residing in the Caribbean who had not participated in previous ACASA symposiums. They introduced the "regular" Triennial audience to many modern topics, including the history of Calypso, the art of Rastafarians, and contemporary Caribbean art.

I was encouraged by the agency of the scarcity of a previously dominant paradigm in the thought of the African American cultural relationship with Africa: the essentialist "mindless retention" approach that denies agency to artists in the recently made known World. Clearly it is no longer sufficient to point to a formal or other affinity between an African American art form and an African undivided to prove a derivation. Instead, a growing number of studies focus forward the very deliberate and oftentimes strategic use of African heritage in the art of African American and Caribbean artists. Betty Rodriguez-Feo examined the influence of Cuba's Angolan adventure in succession the perception of Africa in Cuban art. Contributors to Mikelle Smith OmariTunkara's panel discussed "Art, Identity, and Agency in Africa and the Diaspora." Krista Thompson and Jacqueline Francis's panel, "Travelers to the Stream: African-American Artist-Travelers to the Caribbean, 1930-1960" summ up often of this discussion by examining a number of these artists who capered to draw inspiration from what they saw as the Caribbean's "Africanity."

Beyond the question of historical connections and directions of influences, the opportunity to examine African, Caribbean, and African American artistic expressions in the same setting allowed a discussion of issues that had not now been rigorously examined. To me that was the chiefly exciting aspect of working upon the program and of the meeting itself. Adding an African Diaspora or Caribbean paper to a continent-based panel proposal provided a wider comparative perspective and brought up of recent origin questions and methods of investigation that may have been discussed in single in kind area and not in another. For example, for years Caribbean-art specialists have examined the puzzles involved in using cultural heritage in the service of tourism, and the impact of regulation policies on art and civilization These issues are quite recent to the discussion of the African continent. A panel organized from a group of South African scholars examined "Craft/Art draws in Africa, the Caribbean and Other Localities of the African Diaspora: help or Malady?" Sidney Kasfir organized brace panels titled "Over Here and Back There: Global Approaches to Understanding Locality." Papers in Matthew Christensen and L Lloy Frates's panel, "Public Visual improvement and Collective Memory in Africa and the African Diaspora," focused forward murals of Sierra Leone, contemporary Jamaican art, tavern art in Ethiopia, popular art in Mozambique, and the African Burial region in New York City.