Salah M. Hassan is the Acting Director of the Africana Studies & Research Center and Chair of the Department of the History of Art at Cornell University. He is editor and founder of NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art and consulting editor for African Arts and Atlantica. He has authored or edited several works including Unpacking Europe (2001); Authentic/Ex-Centric (2001); Gendered Visions: The Art of Contemporary African Women Artists (1997); and Art and Islamic Literacy Among the Hausa of Northern Nigeria (1992). He has contributed to various art journals and anthologies including, Women, Patronage, and Self-Representation in Islamic Societies (1999); Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to Marketplace (1999); and most recently, Looking Both Ways (2003). He has also curated several international exhibitions including Unpacking Europe at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam; Authentic/Ex-Centric at the 49th Venice Biennale; EV+A 2001 Expanded in Limerick, Ireland; <Insertion>: Self and Other at Apex Art Gallery, New York; Modernit(ies) and Memor(ies) at the 47th Venice Biennale; Seven Stories about Modern Africa at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; and Malmo Kunsthal, Malmo.

 

 

 



Cheryl Finley is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture in the Africana Studies Department at Cornell University as well as an art critic, columnist and curator specializing in photography, African American art, cultural heritage tourism and the politics of memorialization. Prior to her appointment at Cornell, she was a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Art at Wellesley College and adjunct curator in the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley. She earned her Ph.D. in African American Studies and History of Art from Yale University. She is the author of many books, articles and essays, including From Swing to Soul: An Illustrated History of African American Music from 1930 to 1960 (1994) and Harlem Guaranteed: The Photographic Legacy of James VanDerZee (2002). In 2000, she organized Imaging African Art: Documentation and Transformation at the Yale Art Gallery. She is the co-founder (with Dr. Laura Wexler) of Photographic Memory Workshop at Yale University in 1998. Her research has been generously supported by the Ford Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and the Mellon Foundation among others. Dr. Finley is completing a manuscript and exhibition on the visual memory of the slave ship icon as well as a monograph on the artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons. In 2004-2005 she will be a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts.