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Auckland Art History Professor presents talk and walkabout at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum
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Date: 31 August 2006
A walkabout of the Cyprian Shilakoe: Revisited exhibition at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum will be conducted by Elizabeth Rankin, a Professor of Art History at the University of Auckland, on 31 August at 13:00. There is no charge.
Professor Rankin’s extensive writing and research on South African art, while she was based at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, focused primarily on interchange between black and white artists in the areas of sculpture and print making.
As well as being a printmaker, Cyprian Shilakoe was a sculptor. His work in both fields reflects the realities of township life, particularly the pain of separation and the loneliness of displaced people. He is considered one of the ‘greats’ who studied at the Art and Craft Centre at Rorke’s Drift in the late 1960s. The exhibition of paintings, prints and sculpture which tours to 11 South African Art Museums over a two year period will be displayed at the NMM Art Museum until 3 September.
While in Port Elizabeth, Professor Rankin will also present a talk entitled “Beyond Conservation: Museums and Indigenous Culture in New Zealand’’. There is no charge for the talk which starts at 19:00. Please telephone the Art Museum on 041 5861030 to reserve a seat.
In the past indigenous art and artefacts were thought of as exotic foreign objects and collected for historical ethnographic displays, with little awareness of the continuing existence of indigenous peoples, explains Professor Rankin. “How to address this has become a world-wide concern in contemporary museums, particularly when indigenous peoples are part of their own nations.’’
Since the famous Te Maori exhibition in New York in 1984, New Zealand has led the way in finding new ways of acknowledging its first nation culture. Professor Rankin’s presentation is based on a key-note address invited for a conference in Japan. She will use images and video footage to look at how New Zealand museums are thinking about their collections today, shifting beyond mere conservation to a more proactive role which has drawn Maori and Pacific peoples into the care, interpretation and display of cultural artefacts.
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