Kinshasa conwill biography of williams

1My essay concerns the work of the African-American painter, designer, and educator Löis Mailou Jones, and how travel and migration influenced her life as an artist, including her aesthetic choices, formal practice, theoretical understanding and pedagogical philosophy. Jones was a lifelong educator and her travel, indeed her migration to France and later to Haiti was essential to her worldview and aesthetic practice. She had studios in each of those countries, which she visited frequently for long periods, in addition to her studios in Washington, D.C. and on the island of Martha’s Vineyard in Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts. In addition to Europe and the Caribbean, Africa was a central focus of Jones’ oeuvre, figuring in her pattern of travel and migration as well as in her paintings from the early 1970s onwards. The essay that follows will be framed by the artist’s use of the mask as a visual and symbolic trope to connect with Africa and her African roots, and then to Haiti and a larger African diaspora. This chapter stems from an earlier essay, ‘The Mask as Muse: the Influence of African Art on the Life and Career of Löis Mailou Jones,’ written for the 2009 retrospective exhibition Löis Mailou Jones: A Life in Vibrant Color, curated by Carla M. Hanzal for the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, North Carolina.1

2A 1983 photograph of Loïs Mailou Jones taken in her studio by the famed Scurlock brothers of Washington, D.C. shows the artist in her element, surrounded by images, objects and pieces of history that fueled the fire of her creative energy. Masks peer out from nearly every corner of the room, in animal form, in African ceremonial art, and in framed paintings and reproductions of her own work. A glimpse of her vast library of art books is visible on the right side of the photograph, along with some paintbrushes, pencils, a wooden anatomical model and a poster for the documentary ‘Fifty Years of My Art’ about Jones’s h

A MUSEUM LEADER and institution builder, Kinshasha Holman Conwill dedicated her entire career to being a faithful steward of art, history, and culture, establishing the background and experience necessary to seize the opportunity of a lifetime. Few get the chance to help envision and develop a monument to the African American experience, from ideas and concepts on paper to a fully staffed, internationally recognized architectural gem on American’s National Mall with unparalleled collections.

Conwill had that opportunity over past 17 years as deputy director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, D.C.

More than $320 million was raised from private donors to support the 665,000 square foot, LEED Gold-certified museum. After more than a dozen challenging and rewarding years, when it was finally time for the grand opening on Sept. 24, 2016, President Barack Obama, the first Black President of the United States, did the honors.

Thousands flowed into the museum that weekend. Months later, interest remained off the charts. Incredibly, more than 1 million people had visited by February 2017, according to the museum.

Kinshasha Holman Conwill. | Courtesy Smithsonian NMAAHC

About two years after NMAAHC debuted, Conwill had a brief interview in front of the museum with an outlet called Brown Passport. “The responsibility for being a steward of this wonderful museum is awesome,” she said. “It’s extraordinary and it’s a little overwhelming at times. But it’s such an honor that one gets over the awsomeness of it and it makes coming to work, it makes working with my colleagues, a real joy. But one also feels that one is representing past, present, and future generations.”

Earlier this w

PDF: Holman, review of Souls Grown Deep

Curated by: Raina Lampkins-Fielder, with Emma Yau; and Axel Rüger, with Rebecca Bray

Exhibition Schedule: Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries, Royal Academy of Arts, London, March 17–June 18, 2023

Catalogue: Raina Lampkins-Fielder, Rebecca Salter PRA, Maxwell L. Jackson, Rebecca Bray, Emma Yau, et al., Souls Grown Deep Like the Rivers: Black Artists from the American South, exh. cat. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2023. 138 pp.; 64 color illus. Hardcover: £15 (ISBN: 9781912520954)

First published in W. E. B. Du Bois’s magazine The Crisis in 1921, Langston Hughes’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” uses the metaphor of a traveling body of water to narrate the trials and traversals of African peoples from the Euphrates and the Congo to the Mississippi. It is a tender and lyrical poem that manages to be both an individual search for racial identity and a fearsome urging for the collective spirit. Hughes died on May 22, 1967, and his ashes were later interred under Houston Conwill’s Rivers (1991)—a cosmogram in the foyer of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, with inscribed lines from his 1921 poem. William Arnett, the late collector, curator, and writer from Atlanta, founded the Souls Grown Deep Foundation (SGDF), so named after a line from Hughes’s poem. Arnett’s mission was to document, preserve, and promote the work of leading African American artists from the US South.

Souls Grown Deep Like the Rivers is also the title given to a current exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) in London, which reproduces the Atlanta collection’s name. The exhibition is shown in the Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries, the RA’s sequence of three compact rooms that opened in 2018 with a focus on living artists and architects. The show traces the South’s scarred history, from the horrors of enslavement to the cr

Stokes Sims, Lowery. "Collecting the Art of African-Americans at the Studio Museum in Harlem: Positioning the “New” from the Perspective of the Past". Collecting the New: Museums and Contemporary Art, edited by Bruce Altshuler, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005, pp. 147-162. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400849352.147

Stokes Sims, L. (2005). Collecting the Art of African-Americans at the Studio Museum in Harlem: Positioning the “New” from the Perspective of the Past. In B. Altshuler (Ed.), Collecting the New: Museums and Contemporary Art (pp. 147-162). Princeton: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400849352.147

Stokes Sims, L. 2005. Collecting the Art of African-Americans at the Studio Museum in Harlem: Positioning the “New” from the Perspective of the Past. In: Altshuler, B. ed. Collecting the New: Museums and Contemporary Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 147-162. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400849352.147

Stokes Sims, Lowery. "Collecting the Art of African-Americans at the Studio Museum in Harlem: Positioning the “New” from the Perspective of the Past" In Collecting the New: Museums and Contemporary Art edited by Bruce Altshuler, 147-162. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400849352.147

Stokes Sims L. Collecting the Art of African-Americans at the Studio Museum in Harlem: Positioning the “New” from the Perspective of the Past. In: Altshuler B (ed.) Collecting the New: Museums and Contemporary Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press; 2005. p.147-162. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400849352.147

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