KU News Release

National, interdisciplinary conference on Aaron Douglas to take place at KU

LAWRENCE — A national conference at the University of Kansas will bring together scholars of art, history, dance, theatre and literature to discuss Topeka-born Aaron Douglas, who became the most important visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance during the 1920s and 1930s.

The conference takes place Sept. 28 and 29 at KU’s Spencer Museum of Art. It coincides with a major exhibition of Douglas’ work at the museum, “Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist,” and is free and open to the public.

A free, public reception at 5:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 28, at the museum will open the conference, titled “Aaron Douglas and the Arts of the Harlem Renaissance.” The reception will include refreshments and live jazz.

Richard J. Powell, a leading scholar of African-American art, will set the tone for the conference with his keynote address at 7 p.m. Friday in the museum’s auditorium. Powell is the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University in Durham, N.C. He will speak on “Shadow Play, City Lights: A Harlem Renaissance Mode.”

The conference continues all day Saturday, Sept. 29, which Gov. Kathleen Sebelius has declared Aaron Douglas Day in Kansas. Beginning at 8 a.m., conference speakers will examine the strong connection Douglas had with his contemporaries in the visual, literary and performing arts during the Harlem Renaissance.

The conference speakers and their topics are:

— Gerald Early, the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters at Washington University in St. Louis, “The New Negro Movement and What it Wrought”
— Amy Helene Kirschke, associate professor of art history at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, “Aaron Douglas and the Harlem Renaissance: The Visual Rhetoric of Identity and Memory”

— Farah Jasmine Griffin, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, “Aaron Douglas and the Literary Luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance”
— Robert O’Meally, the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University, “Aaron Douglas's Concentric Circles: Kings and Queens of the Blues”
— Brenda Dixon Gottschild, professor emerita of dance studies at Temple University in Philadelphia and a senior consultant and writer for Dance Magazine, “The Stories Pictures Tell: Dance Footprints in Selected Works of Aaron Douglas”
— David Krasner, associate professor of performing arts at Emerson College in Boston, “Dark Tower and the Saturday Nighters: Two Directions in African American Drama”
— Terry Adkins, associate professor of fine arts in the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania, “The Vigilant Torch of a Long Distance Painter”

Aaron Douglas Day and the conference conclude with a Cabaret/Harlem Renaissance-style Rent Party from 8 to 11 p.m. Saturday in the Kansas Union ballroom. The cabaret, conceived and directed by 2006 KU theatre alumnus Eric F. Avery of Minneapolis, Minn., will feature KU student performers; a veteran lineup of Kansas City-area jazz musicians also will perform. Tickets are $10 for the public and $5 for students with ID cards.

“The main goal of the conference is to assess the complex constellation of artists, writers and political and creative thinkers who comprised the Harlem Renaissance, a period of African-American cultural and intellectual flowering, and to highlight Douglas’ place within it,” said William J. Harris, KU associate professor of English, who organized the conference.

Conference registration is available at www.aarondouglas.ku.edu/conference/index.shtml.

The exhibition, “Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist,” is on view at the Spencer Museum of Art through Dec. 2. It brings together nearly 100 works from across the country to offer a comprehensive look at Douglas’ career.

Susan Earle, curator of European and American Art, organized the exhibition and edited the exhibition catalogue. Stephanie Fox Knappe, a KU graduate student in art history, is coordinator for the exhibition and conference.

More about “Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist” is available online at www.aarondouglas.ku.edu/.

Conference and rent party support is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation Inc.; the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency; the Kansas Arts Commission, a state agency; the Spencer Museum of Art; the KU Interdisciplinary Jazz Studies Group; the Hall Center for the Humanities; the Franklin D. Murphy Lecture Fund, Kress Foundation Department of Art History; the Greater Kansas City Chapter of The Links Inc.; and University Theatre.

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