This reception spotlights a week of Africa-related activities on campus: talks from the Mershon Africa Forum and Mershon’s Centering the Global Periphery sas well as the opening of the Urban Arts Space exhibition Embroidered Past, Imagined Future: Lucie Kamuswekera and the Violence in Eastern Congo, curated by Dr. Sarah Van Beurden (History/AAAS) and supported by Global Arts+Humanities. With this reception we also celebrate the relaunch of the university’s Center for African Studies and welcome our new Black Studies colleagues.
Lucie Kamuswekera’s embroidered observations offer insightful readings of the current conflict in eastern Congo, violence against women, international intervention, and the relation between violence and the exploitation of natural resources. Now 80 years old, Lucie learned to embroider in a missionary school as a child under Belgian colonialism; as a young woman, she experienced the turbulent period of Congolese independence. The upheavals of the 1990s in the Eastern Congo led to the killing of her husband and her own forced escape. Resettled in the city of Goma, she began to create art as an economic and expressive response to this challenging history. Exceptional as a woman in the DR Congo art world, Lucie joins a longstanding tradition of social commentary in African popular “urban” art.
Cosponsored by the Global Arts + Humanities "Conflict and Im/Mobilities" Grant and the Center for African Studies
