BLACK HISTORY/ART HISTORY

Shaun El C. Leonardo earned his BA from Bowdoin College (2001) and his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (2005). He has received awards and residencies from the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Drawing on superhero and sports imagery, his works examine issues of stereotype, masculinity, and societal expectations

Leonardo’s solo exhibitions include Champion of the World, Praxis International Art, New York (2013); Battle Royal, Videodromo, Ancona, Italy (2012); Sleeping Giant, Praxis International Art, Miami (2011); El Debut de El Conquistador, La Curtiduria, Oaxaca, Mexico (2008); Self-Portrait Fight, Performa 07, El Museo del Barrio, New York (2007); Shaun El C. Leonardo, Rhys Gallery, Boston (2007); and The Steel Cage Match, LMCC Swing Space Performance, New York (2006). His group exhibitions include superHUMAN, Central Utah Art Center, Ephraim (2012); Greater New York: Five-Year Review, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY (2010); Mixed Signals: Artists Consider Masculinity in Sports, Independent Curators International, traveling exhibition (2009–11); Hard Targets: Masculinity and American Sports, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2008); The S-Files, Museo del Barrio, New York (2007); Emergency Room, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY (2007); Black Alphabet: Contexts of Contemporary African American Art, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland (2006); The Masculine Box and Beyond, LAB, San Francisco (2006); and God Complex: Images of Power, Rush Arts Gallery, New York (2006).

One-on-Ones, Leonardo's newest performance, will take place at 5:30pm, Friday, February 28th, on Memorial Hall Lawn (between the Queen's Head Pub and the Science Center) at Harvard University. This piece will draw on the artist's experiences with American football, and feature players from the Harvard Crimson football team.  The outdoor performance will last from approximately 5:30-6:00pm, and it will be followed by a discussion and reception in room B04 at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.

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John Peffer is a specialist in modern African art and photography and Associate Professor of Art History at Ramapo College of New Jersey, where he also serves as the Convener of Visual Arts. He is the author of Art and the End of Apartheid (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), which was a finalist for the African Studies Association’s Melville J. Herskovitz Award, and co-editor of the volume Photography and Portraiture in Africa (Indiana University Press, 2013). A former editor (2007-2010) of the journal Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture, Peffer’s writing has also appeared in African Arts, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, Art Journal, Third Text, and Visual Anthropology Review, as well as a variety of exhibition catalogs. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Clark Art Institute Fellowship, a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Award, and a College Art Association Millard Meiss award.

Currently, Professor Peffer serves as President of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association and is at work on a new book project entitled Colored Photographs of White Weddings: A Study of Reception in South Africa, which examines the vernacular uses of photography in South Africa with a special emphasis on hand-colored wedding photographs from Soweto from the 1950s. Professor Peffer received a Ph.D. in Art History and Archaeology from Columbia University and a B.A. in African Studies from Indiana University.

Ingrid Mwangi was born in Nairobi, Kenya. Robert Hutter was born in Ludwigshafen, Germany. They both received New Artistic Media degrees from the University of Fine Arts Saar, Saarbrücken, and have received scholarships from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes, and residency scholarships of the Rhineland-Palatinate studio at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. Their work has been shown across Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America, at the Bienal de Sao Paulo, the Brooklyn Museum, DAK'ART, the Museum for African Art, Museum für Moderne Kunst, National Museum for African Art, among others. In 2005, after working together for several years and marrying, Mwangi and Hutter formed the collective Mwangi Hutter. Mwangi Hutter view their work as a common vision arising from two bodies, two minds, dual histories and the continuous merging of expression. Working with performance, video, digital photography and installation, they are developing a body of artwork that addresses universal human experience, using themselves and their diverse surroundings as the sounding board for creating an aesthetics of self-knowledge and relation.

Born in a place they call Nairobi Ludwigshafen, Mwangi Hutter live and work in Berlin, Germany and Nairobi, Kenya.

Deborah Willis, Ph.D., is Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and has an affiliated appointment as a University Professor with the College of Arts and Sciences, Africana Studies. Named one of the "100 Most Important People in Photography" by American Photo Magazine, she is a practicing photographer as well as one of the nation's leading historians and curators of African American art.

Dr. Willis has been the recipient of Guggenheim, Fletcher, and MacArthur fellowships, as well as the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation Award. Her newest book, Out [o] Fashion Photography: Embracing Beauty was released by the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington Press, and a co-authored project, Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery, was released by Temple University Press. Other publications include, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present, Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs, and Black Venus 2010: They Called Her "Hottentot," and The Black Female Body A Photographic History with Carla Williams. Her curated exhibitions include: "Out [o] Fashion Photography: Embracing Beauty" at the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, "Posing Beauty" which is still touring, "Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits" at the International Center of Photography, "Engulfed by Katrina: Photographs before and After the Storm" at Nathan Cummings Foundation, and "Imagining Families—Images and Voices and Reflections in Black."

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