Paul R. Jones symposium set Dec. 3

Sharon F. Patton, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art

3:33 p.m., Oct. 12, 2004--The Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts (DCCA) and the University of Delaware will co-sponsor a special symposium honoring UD benefactor Paul R. Jones from 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Friday, Dec. 3.

Special guest speaker for the event will be Sharon F. Patton, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art and a renowned expert on African American art.

The symposium will be held in conjunction with the DCCA exhibition Telling Tales: Narrative Threads in Contemporary African-American Art, which will open Oct. 15 and run through Feb. 16, 2005.

The event honors Jones for his generous gift to the University of Delaware of the Paul R. Jones Collection, which is one of the world’s oldest, largest and most complete collections of works by 20th-Century African American artists.

Currently, UD is holding the first major exhibition of works drawn from the collection. Titled A Century of African American Art: The Paul R. Jones Collection, the show will run until June 2005, at newly renovated Mechanical Hall and in the University Gallery in adjacent Old College.

Participants in the symposium can meet at Mechanical Hall at 10 a.m., or alternately can meet at DCCA, 200 South Madison St., Wilmington, at 9 a.m., for bus transportation to Mechanical Hall.

There, Amalia Amaki, curator of the Paul R. Jones Collection and an accomplished artist in her own right, will lead a tour of the show.

At 11:30 a.m., participants will go the DCCA for lunch and a tour of the center’s exhibition with curator J. Susan Isaacs. After the tour, Amaki, Willie Cole and Mildred Howard, the three artists featured in Telling Tales, will take part in a panel discussion at 2 p.m.

At 3 p.m., Patton will deliver a lecture on the DCCA exhibition. In addition to serving as director of the National Museum of African Art, Patton is the author of the books Memory and Metaphor, the Art of Romare Bearden (Oxford University Press, 1991) and African-American Art (Oxford University Press, 1998), which received Choice’s Outstanding Academic Book of the Year Award.

Patton joined the Smithsonian in March 2003 after having served as the John G. W. Cowles Director of Oberlin College’s Allen Memorial Art Museum.

Patton began her tenure at Oberlin as professor of art in October 1998. Before coming to Oberlin, she was associate professor of art history at the University of Michigan and director of its Center for AfroAmerican and African Studies.

Previously, she served as director of the art galleries at New Jersey’s Montclair State College and as chief curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Patton, whose research interests focus on West African and African American art, has organized 20 exhibitions.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art is the only museum in the United States dedicated to the collection, exhibition and study of African art.

To register for the symposium, contact DCCA’s Holly Bennett at (302) 656-6466, extension 7101, or send e-mail to [hbennett@thedcca.org]. The registration deadline is Nov. 22.

Article by Neil Thomas

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