News from the cultural sector in the regions and internationally thanks to our correspondents abroad and those who create cultural life where they are and every Friday, news from the artists in residence at the Villa Albertine, in the United States.
Today Arnaud Laporte speaks with Anne Lafont, art historian and director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Anne Lafon has been a researcher and teacher for twenty years, she is the author of several books:
art and race (2022),
The African (everything) against the eye of the Enlightenment -which won her the Fetkann Maryse Condé Prize in the research category and the Vitale and Arnold Blokh Prize in 2020. She also collaborates with museums and contributed, among other things, to the exhibition The black model from Géricault to Matisse from the Musée d’Orsay in 2019.
This residence at the Villa Albertine, which will take her to New York, New Orleans and Chicago, will allow her to extend her investigation of the figural space of the black Atlantic and to identify motifs, tropes and afrotropes, at the intersection of black, American and French histories since the colonial period.
“I propose to take two iconic figures: Marie Laveau (Métis from New Orleans, 1794-1881) and Jean-Baptiste Pointe du Sable (Haitian and founding father of Chicago, 1745-1818) because the intersection of their lives and their respective iconographic fortunes puts into tension the question of image, history, art and memory, public and private, gender, celebrity and erasure, in the emergence and the conceptualization of the Black Atlantic.” Anne-Lafon