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Otolith Group: Opening Reception

Exhibition Opening

Otolith Group: Opening Reception

The London-based collective will present Mascon, a mosaic of images and sounds inspired by African cinema.

In the fall of 2024, the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society will present a new moving-image work by the Otolith Group titled Mascon: A Massive Concentration of Black Experiential Energy. The exhibition is conceived as a complement to a new mural commissioned for the Art Institute of Chicago’s Griffin Court, on view starting September 26. The images that form the building blocks of the mural are stills from the film.

Both installations are presented as part of a series of exhibitions and events linked to Panafrica: Histories, Aesthetics, Politics, a multi-year research project at the Neubauer Collegium that is exploring the links between Pan-African politics and culture. Together the Otolith Group’s mural and film essay serve as a prelude to Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, a major exhibition opening December 15 at the Art Institute that was informed by the research project and curated by members of the research team.

The artists describe Mascon as an “audiovisual investigation into the gestures, geometries, grammars, and geographies that compose the forms and forces of the films of Ousmane Sembène and Djibril Diop Mambéty.” Mascon consists of a mosaic of images extracted from the works of these two Senegalese directors, prominent figures among a generation of African auteurs whose films explored the emancipatory movements that swept across the continent in the late 1950s and early ’60s. According to the Otolith Group, their homage to these filmmakers “summons the borderless imagination of the cine-Sahel,” amplifying and distilling Sembène’s and Mambéty’s favored motifs in order to elicit what American literary scholar Stephen Henderson termed “mascon” (shorthand for “a massive concentration of black experiential energy”).

Curated by Dieter Roelstraete

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Neubauer Collegium

The London-based collective will present Mascon, a mosaic of images and sounds inspired by African cinema.

Register

Negotiating Identities, Constructing Territories: Pre-Roman Iberia, 900-200 BCE

Conference

Negotiating Identities, Constructing Territories: Pre-Roman Iberia, 900-200 BCE

This conference will present novel data and perspectives on the social and economic networks in the ancient Mediterranean region.

Neubauer Collegium
5701 S. Woodlawn Ave.
Oct. 17 & 19

Franke Institute for the Humanities
1100 E. 57th St.
Oct. 18


Beginning in the ninth century BCE the coasts and fertile valleys of Iberia were tapped by Phoenician and Greek merchants and settlers coming from the eastern Mediterranean. An extended international network was created, which attracted the participation of Etruscans, Sardinians, Cypriots, and others. This conference interrogates how these diverse groups first knitted an interconnected space, which led to the making of new economic, cultural, and environmental horizons before the Mediterranean was politically connected under Rome. The conference presents novel data and perspectives with a focus on the negotiation and construction of identities and territories, as well as new explorations of past environmental challenges.

Organized by Michael Dietler (University of Chicago, Anthropology) and Carolina López-Ruiz (University of Chicago, Divinity School and Department of Classics) as part of the Negotiating Identities, Constructing Territories research project at the Neubauer Collegium.

Co-sponsored by the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Center for International Social Science Research (CISSR), the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC), and the Departments of Anthropology and Classics at the University of Chicago.

Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society
Franke Institute for the Humanities

This conference will present novel data and perspectives on the social and economic networks in the ancient Mediterranean region.

Register

Betye Saar: Opening Reception

Exhibition Opening

Betye Saar: Opening Reception

This exhibition will hinge on Saar's experiments with “wearable” art, bringing into focus her gradual shift from costume design to collage.

The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society will present an exhibition by Betye Saar, a key figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s. Inspired by the transformative memory of Saar’s visit to the African collections of Chicago’s Field Museum in the mid-1970s, this exhibition will hinge on the artist’s experiments with “wearable” art, bringing into focus her gradual shift from working in costume design toward the instantly recognizable collage aesthetic she is justly feted for to this day.

Neubauer Collegium

This exhibition will hinge on Saar's experiments with “wearable” art, bringing into focus her gradual shift from costume design to collage.

Register

Director’s Lecture with Drew Gilpin Faust

Director's Lecture

Director’s Lecture with Drew Gilpin Faust

Drew Gilpin Faust, President Emerita of Harvard University, is a renowned scholar of American history.

About the Speaker

Drew Gilpin Faust is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Research Professor at Harvard, where she served as president from 2007 to 2018.

Faust previously served as founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2001-2007). Before coming to Radcliffe, she was the Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.

She is the author of seven books, including, most recently, Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury, published in August 2023. Her earlier book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008), was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and was awarded the Bancroft Prize, the New-York Historical Society’s American History Book Prize, and recognized by The New York Times as one of the “Ten Best Books of 2008.” This Republic of Suffering is the basis for a 2012 Emmy-nominated episode of the PBS American Experience documentaries titled Death and the Civil War, directed by Ric Burns.

Faust’s honors include awards in 1982 and 1996 for distinguished teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994, the Society of American Historians in 1993, and the American Philosophical Society in 2004. In September 2018 she was awarded the John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity by the Library of Congress. She received her bachelor’s degree from Bryn Mawr in 1968, magna cum laude with honors in history, and master’s (1971) and doctoral (1975) degrees in American civilization from the University of Pennsylvania. She and her husband live in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

About the Director's Lecture Series

The Roman Family Director’s Lecture series at the Neubauer Collegium, made possible through the generous support of University of Chicago Trustee Emmanuel Roman, MBA’87, brings distinguished speakers to the University of Chicago to share their insights with faculty, students, and the broader community. The aim of these events is to deepen public knowledge about the world and humanity’s place in it. More >

Drew Gilpin Faust, President Emerita of Harvard University, is a renowned scholar of American history.

Register