Karen Kurczynski

Is an Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She published The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn: The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up in 2014. She is a Fulbright scholar at the University of Ghent this Fall, co-teaching the MA seminar with Steven Jacobs and researching a new book on the Cobra movement.

Variétés, Africa, and Primitivism (Karen Kurczynski)

This talk will examine the representation of black people and African art in Variétés through the lenses of primitivism and Surrealist ethnography, both recognizing the subversive power of its unorthodox juxtapositions and questioning its reinscriptions of blackness and whiteness.