A gala evening celebrating the arts and culture of Africa and the Diaspora in recognition of Mrs. Roberta Golding (1921-2012) and her gift that founded the Stuart S. Golding Endowed Chair in African Art.



Panel Discussion, 7 PM, Theatre I, featuring:



María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Artist, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.  

María Magdalena Campos-Pons is an Afro-Cuban artist based in Boston. Her many works have focused on history, race, gender, memory, and the formation of identity. She works primarily in photography, performance, audiovisual media, and sculpture. Her  work of the last 20 years covers an extended range of visual language investigations. Campos-Pons' work emerges from the early 1980s  focus on painting and the discussion of sexuality in the crossroads of Cuban mixed cultural heritage to incisive questioning, critique and insertion of the black body in the contemporary narratives of the present. Installation art, performative photography and cultural activism define the core of Campos-Pons' practice of the last two decades.



Dr. Amanda Carlson, Art Historian, University of Hartford; former Golding Chair at USF.  

Amanda Carlson received a Ph.D. in Art History and African Studies from Indiana University (Bloomington) and has conducted research in many parts of Africa on topics such as contemporary art, photography, indigenous writing systems, masquerades, and women s ritual performances. She is now a professor at the University of Hartford, Connecticut.



Dr. Chika Okeke-Agulu, Art Historian, Princeton University; USF Art History MA alumnus.  

Dr. Chika Okeke-Agulu specializes on classical, modern, and contemporary African and African Diaspora art history and theory. He previously taught at The Pennsylvania State University, Emory University, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and Yaba College of Technology, Lagos. Professor Okeke-Agulu was the Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor of Art History at Williams College (2007), and Clark Fellow at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (2008). A former USF Masters in Art History graduate, he is on the faculty of the Center for African American Studies, Princeton University.



Dr. Allison Moore, Art Historian, USF; Assistant Professor; Moderator.

Dr. Moore s work includes curatorial as well as academic approaches to the study of African photography and contemporary art. She is interested in the intersections of the global and the local, and in postcolonial and feminist theories as applied to contemporary African art. Her book project examines the impact of the founding of the pan-African Bamako Photography Biennale (Rencontres Africaines de la photographie) on Malian art photography.



Following the Panel Discussion:

Food, Drink, and Live Music - FAH Courtyard