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Project Collaborator

Antawan Byrd

Weinberg Fellow, Department of Art History Northwestern University

Biography

Antawan I. Byrd specializes in modern and contemporary art of Africa and the African diaspora, with a particular focus on histories of photography, sound, urbanism, and popular culture. Byrd is currently completing his dissertation, titled “Interferences: Sound, Technology, and the Politics of Listening in Afro-Atlantic Art,” which examines how African and African diasporic artists reorient understandings of sixties-era politics through recourse to sound/technologies and practices of listening. As an associate curator of photography and media at the Art Institute of Chicago, he curated Mimi Cherono Ng’ok: Closer to the Earth, Closer to My Own Body (2021), and co-curated The People Shall Govern! Medu Art Ensemble and the Anti-Apartheid Poster (2019). Though his continued affiliation with the museum, Byrd is collaboratively working on a major exhibition on Pan-Africanism slated to open in 2024. For more details on his research and publications, please visit his profile page at Northwestern University.

Project

A Kerry James Marshall sculpture depicting Africa

Pan-Africa: Histories, Aesthetics, Politics

2021 – 2024