Through The Wire: Weaving Resilience, Resistance, and Reimaging African Futures

This program is presented in conjuntion with the exhibition iNgqikithi yokuPhica / Weaving Meanings: Telephone Wire Art from South Africa.

Join us for a public talk with Dr. Andrea L. Mays, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Africana Studies at the University of New Mexico.

Creative and expressive arts, and the politics of such arts, are extensions of the societies from which they emerge. Through telephone wire weaving, South African artists have mobilized traditional aesthetics, imaginative aspirations, and married impulses with function and form in creative expression to arrive at vibrant articulations of usable, and useful, art. This talk explores the relationship between art, resistance, and cultural resiliency through the original South African material form of telephone wire weaving.  Dr. Mays unpacks the political landscape behind this unique cultural form, US history, and both popular and entertainment culture of the time, to explore the relationship between the arts and resistance across the Atlantic during South African Apartheid.

This event is free for MNMF members and please R.S.V.P. in advance here.