Sound: Print: Record: African American Legacies is devoted to the visual arts and black musical traditions. The exhibition juxtaposes historical, documentary photographs of musical performers with modern and contemporary artworks that seriously engage the legacy of black American music. In both playful and thought-provoking ways, the exhibition highlights the multiple ways artists re-document, de-document, and sound off in relationship with and to the legacy of black American music. Sound: Print: Record is curated by Dr. Julie L. McGee, Curator of African American art and Dr. Charles D. Carson, Assistant Professor, Music History and Literature. Artists represented include: Terry Adkins, Jim Alexander, Frank Bowling, Adger Cowans, John Dowell, Curlee Holton, Whitfield Lovell, Jefferson Pinder, P.H. Polk, Ellington Robinson, Frank Stewart, William T. Williams and more.

Sound: Print: Record: African American Legacies Symposium
University of Delaware, Roselle Center for the Performing Arts, Oct. 1-2, 2009.

Sound: Print: Record: African American Legacies is an interdisciplinary symposium developed in conjunction with an art exhibition of the same name sponsored by the University Museums of the University of Delaware and on view at Mechanical Hall Gallery September 2-December 6, 2009. The symposium explores how the ephemeral - live sound - is made tangible, etched in memory, incorporated into the visual arts, literature, history and communal traditions. Panelists and speakers will explore how scholars and artists respond to African American music and its legacies. Issues to be examined include how black music and its traditions are preserved, recorded, fixed and unfixed, imagined and re-imagined for contemporary audiences. Performance, the creative process, and the making of art are highlighted as the inspiration and content of scholarly inquiry in multiple humanistic disciplines: art and its history, musicology, literature, history and sociology.

Featured guests and themes:
“Fixing a Legacy”: Black Music and History
Devoted to an examination of how the history of black music is constructed, this panel contrasts the invited speakers perspectives from within the recording industry, from the academy, and from alternative non-traditional networks in order to highlight the means by which the black popular music becomes history.

• Kandia Crazy Horse, music writer and editor, currently Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in American Studies, Princeton University
• Dr. Jason King, Associate Professor and Artistic Director of the Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music, NYU
• Harry Weinger, Vice President, Artists & Repertoire, Universal Music Enterprises.

Sound/Record
This panel explores the technological, economic, and cultural dynamics that shaped African American participation in sound recording. Considered here are the origins, character, and effects of African American sound recording and specific historical circumstances within its development.

• Ned Sublette, internationally regarded musician, producer and musicologist
• Tim Brooks, author, music historian, and scholar of the recording industry
• Dr. Karl Hagstrom Miller, Assistant Professor in the Departments of History and Music at the University of Texas, Austin.

Art/Music/Art
Honored here are the spoken word, performance, the visual and the aural - sight and sound. Invited speakers bring focus to the varying ways in which the arts become resources for each other and how certain creative endeavors both inform and become part of the cultural legacy we assign to African American music and sound.

• John Dowell, Professor of Printmaking, The Tyler School of Art, Temple University
• Dr. MR Daniel, interdisciplinary artist and scholar, Princeton University
• Dr. Tracie Morris, interdisciplinary poet and scholar, Associate Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute.
• George E. Lewis, Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music, and the Director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University.

Closing Plenary led by Dr. Nancy Weiss Hanrahan, Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Women and Gender Studies as George Mason University

The SPR symposium will open Thursday afternoon, Oct. 1 and include a keynote address, discussion and an evening performance. There will be a dinner break between the opening session and performance. On Friday, Oct. 2 the symposium runs from 9 AM- 5PM. The symposium schedule and registration will be updated and posted on-line on the University of Delaware website this summer.

BOTH EVENTS ARE FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

To register for the symposium contact Peggy Lea (302) 831 8037 or
universitymuseums@udel.edu

This program is partially funded by a grant from the Delaware Humanities Forum, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities.  
Additional support comes from College of Arts and Sciences, the Paul R. Jones Initiative, Faculty Senate Committee on Cultural Activities and Public Events and the Department of Art Conservation.