Image
Margo Crawford delivering keynote address By Any Means Necessary: When Black Abstraction Becomes Black Representation at March Meeting. Sharjah Art Foundation, 2023
Overview
In the keynote titled ‘By Any Means Necessary: When Black Abstraction Becomes Black Representation’, Margo Crawford discusses the politics behind the strategic abstraction of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and 1970s, in particular the work of the AfriCOBRA visual arts collective and its ties to African diasporic aesthetics. Proposing abstraction as a starting point of identity politics movements and a form of Black self-determination, Crawford analyses visual examples of Black abstraction to explore the balance and tension between Black representation and abstraction.