robert farris thompson flash of the spirit

Additional funding was provided by the members of the Dia Art Council, the major annual support group of Dia Center for the Arts, and the Dia Art Circle.Art, Character, and Coolness amongst the Yoruba PeopleĪrt to the Yoruba people immortalized various forms of their cultural norms. Funding for 'Worlds Envisioned: Alighiero e Boetti and Frédéric Bruly Bouabré' was received from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, Washington, D.C. His articles have been anthologized in more than fourteen books and he has designed and organized five major exhibitions of African and Afro-American art.įunding for the lecture series has been provided by a generous grant from the Robert Lehman Foundation, Inc. Other publications include Black Gods and Kings (1971), African Art and Motion (1974), The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds (1981), Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (1983). Tracing icons and philosophies in altar making from major African civilizations to the Americas, the book restores many works of art, long considered in isolation from each other, to their original constellating power.

His most recent book, Face of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americas, (1993), is a comparative study of Afro-Atlantic altars. Professor Thompson is Master of Timothy Dwight College at Yale University and Professor of African and Afro-American art history at the same institution. Professor Thompson will focus on the work of the Ivorian artist Frédéric Bruly Bouabré. Selected in consultation with the artists, the show highlights the two artists' affinities: both may be described as cosmographers, individuals with an encyclopedic curiosity about the world, and a fascination with the systems, codes and schemata by which such knowledge is recorded, archived, coded, and classified. This lecture is organized in conjunction with the exhibition 'Worlds Envisioned: Alighiero e Boetti and Frédéric Bruly Bouabré,' at Dia's main exhibition facility, 548 West 22nd Street, on view through June 25, 1995.

The lecture, entitled 'Scripts of the Spirit: African Ideograms in World Art History,' will begin at 6:30 p.m. As part of the Robert Lehman Lectures on Contemporary Art Robert Farris Thompson will lecture on the work of Frédéric Bruly Bouabré at Dia Center for the Arts, 548 West 22nd Street, New York City, on Thursday, June 22, 1995.

Robert farris thompson flash of the spirit