Don’t miss this conversation with internationally renowned artist El Anatsui offered in conjunction with UMMA’s exhibition of El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote You about Africa. The exhibition presents work from throughout the artist’s life in diverse media that invite reflection on memory and history as well as the countless everyday objects we so readily use up and discard. Born in Ghana and residing in Nigeria, where he is a professor at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, El Anatsui’s work has engaged the local and the international with global impact. The power of his forms and their equally strong relationship to conceptual ideas connect them to traditions of African art, yet his transformations of material and experience–whether somber or joyful–are dynamic and contemporary and have gained him an international reputation. El Anatsui will be interviewed by longtime colleague and University of Toronto Professor Elizabeth Harney.

Dr. Harney has written and published widely about global modernisms, contemporary art practice in Africa and its diasporas, post-colonial theory, and the politics of exhibition. Harney also served as the first curator of contemporary art at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution.

This program is organized by UMMA with the UM Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design as part of the Penny W. Stamps Speaker series with the assistance of the Institute for the Humanities, and the generous supporter of campus partners and donors listed below.

El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa is organized by the Museum for African Art, New York, and has been supported, in part, by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Lead support for UMMA’s installation is provided by the University of Michigan Health System, Office of the President, Office of the Provost, Office of the Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, and School of Art & Design's Penny Stamps Speaker Series; the University of Michigan Credit Union; and the James L. and Vivian A. Curtis Endowment Fund. Additional generous support is provided by the University of Michigan African Studies Center, CEW Frances and Sydney Lewis Visiting Leaders Fund, Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, Department of the History of Art, Institute for the Humanities, Museum Studies Program, and School of Natural Resources & Environment.