Salah Hassan, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Africana Scientific tests, has been elected as the 2021 Distinguished Scholar by the Faculty Art Association, the most significant and oldest scholarly and expert affiliation in the subject of art record. The honor was celebrated with a distinctive session at the CAA 2021 Yearly Conference in February.
Hassan, an art historian, artwork critic and curator, is an specialist on African and African Diaspora artwork heritage and visual cultures. He focuses notably on contemporary artwork and modernism from comparative views.
“Salah Hassan’s scholarship and curatorial get the job done have been deeply formative in bringing recognition to the analyze of contemporary and up to date African and African diaspora artwork,” reported Iftikhar Dadi, associate professor and chair of the Office of Record of Art. “As a result of the sustained attempts of a small quantity of scholars, foremost among them Salah Hasan, this area is now amid the most important in the willpower.”
“I am of system humbled by these an honor from the major scholarly business in my industry. I am also pleased as it signals a major change in a subject that has for so prolonged remained Eurocentric, and in which arts of areas this sort of as Africa, Asia and Latin America remained an appendix to, or a derivative of, the western narrative,” Hassan mentioned. As he additional emphasised, these kinds of an honor also signaled, “a change to a much more world-wide and comparativist solution to artwork historical past and visual tradition, a vindication to the relentless energy of many scholars in the final two or a few a long time.”
This honor by the CAA, the most important expert affiliation in the self-discipline of artwork record, recognizes Hassan’s scholarly contributions in creating, modifying, publishing, curating exhibitions on “major but neglected artists,” and instruction doctoral pupils, explained Dadi, who accomplished his Ph.D. beneath Hassan’ supervision at Cornell in the Office of Background of Artwork in 2003, concentrating on the fashionable artwork of South Asia.
“Although my have area is mostly not the art of Africa or its diaspora, there ended up several typical frameworks that we shared, which provided the relevance of postcolonial techniques to the research of contemporary artwork of the non-Western environment and the world wide South,” Dadi reported. “Salah Hassan has generally regarded that the problems that are appropriate for modern tradition in Africa, and the inquiries that its diaspora topics experience, are also encountered by other areas and their diasporas from the world wide South. Therefore, strategies that emphasize comparison and vital cross disciplinary views are particularly salient in addressing the modern day art of these areas and peoples.”
Hassan claimed that as a expert in present-day and fashionable artwork, he has expert the richness that artists from Africa and the African diaspora have introduced to the forefront of creativeness and inventive excellence: “They have been at the slicing edge of shaping fashionable and contemporary art, and nonetheless their innovative endeavours, which have even affected big western artists and actions, have been absolutely overlooked and below-acknowledged,” he claimed. “My commitment has been to expand the narrative of artwork record and change it toward a far more international vision by reinserting their stories, wherever it ought to match.”
Hassan more contributed to “a wide and deep review of international modern-day art” by serving on doctoral committees for several learners working on several geographic places and matters, Dadi said. Hassan was chair of Cornell’s Division of Record of Art from 2001 to 2006, with the vision to reorient the division to emphasize comparison, global perspectives and rising matters.
Hassan launched the Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell to deliver a cross-disciplinary house for research and scholarship, workshops and conferences, fellowships for browsing students and artists, and graduate scholar routines.
He is co-founder and co-editor of “Nka: Journal of Present-day African Art” (Duke College Press), the foremost contemporary artwork journal on African and African diaspora art, between other editorial assignments.
Not long ago, Hassan co-arranged a big conference at the Tate in London, “Axis of Solidarity: Landmarks, Platforms, Futures,” in February 2019. Designed as the initially massive-scale party of the recently inaugurated Hyundai Tate Investigate Centre: Transnational, the conference was held in collaboration with the Institute for Comparative Modernities and The Africa Institute of Sharjah. The convention revisited the worldwide solidarity actions that emerged in the second fifty percent of the twentieth century in the course of the period of decolonization in Africa, Asia and Latin The united states.
Hassan’s groundbreaking curatorial initiatives have focused on significant artists formerly forgotten because of to the longstanding Eurocentrism of the museum entire world, Dadi said. He curated “Unpacking Europe,” a important exhibition in 2001 at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, Netherlands showcasing some 20 global artists that critically examined Europe’s legacies in its relationship with the relaxation of the earth. Hassan’s other key exhibitions have focused on assorted movements in African and African-American present day and modern artwork, these kinds of as Surrealism in Egypt, and the Khartoum Faculty of Art.
His e-book “Ibrahim El Salahi: A Visionary Modernist,” was posted in 2012 in conjunction with the retrospective of the Sudanese artist, Ibrahim El Salahi, which was exhibited at the Tate Contemporary in London in 2013 immediately after premiering in the Sharjah, UAE, the very first-ever retrospective exhibition of an African artist in a main Western museum.
Hassan has authored, edited and co-edited numerous books together with “Darfur and the Crisis of Governance: A Crucial Reader” (2009) and “Diaspora, Memory, Place” (2008). Most lately, he has been on a series of publications relevant to The Khartoum School and the Modern day Art Movement in Sudan, and on the Egyptian Surrealism supported by the Sharjah Art Foundation.
He is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, such as the J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship, as nicely as important grants from the Sharjah Art Foundation, Ford, Rockefeller, Andy Warhol and Prince Claus Fund foundations.
Study the tale on the Higher education of Arts and Sciences internet site.