Misogynoir and the image of the African woman

Sunday 12th March

How the image of the African woman was eliminated in Western European Art and her journey back to centre stage

 

Andromeda, Moses’s wife and the Queen of Sheba where all Black so why:

…is Andromeda always painted as white when Ovid, the Roman poet who created her described her as ‘dark skinned’ the daughter of the King and Queen of ‘Ethiopia the land of Burnt Faces’ ?

…do we not see ever images of Moses Ethiopian wife?

….is the queen of Sheba white when she came from Sheba where the Black King came from?

You can have these questions answered at this illustrated online presentation.

This is an illustrated review of how the representations of the Bible’s black women, Moses’s Ethiopian wife and the Queen of Sheba and Ovid’s black Andromeda, the daughter of the King of Ethiopia, have been handled in canonical western art by Titian, Veronese and others, how the images of Black women became white, demonised, sexualised or disappeared over time. Considering her movement from elimination during the Renaissance, anonymisation in the eighteenth and nineteenth century to the reclamations of her image in the twentieth century and celebration of her image in the twenty-first century…..if you want to know why we celebrate the Black King today yet there is no equivalent Black Queen in canonical works of art of Western Europe – then this talk is for you.

Presentation given by Michael I. Ohajuru FRSA

Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (2022), Senior Fellow of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies (2017), Honours degrees in Physics (1974) and Art History (2008). Blogs, writes and speaks regularly on the Black presence in Renaissance Europe. Has spoken at the National Gallery, Tate Britain, British Library, National Archives and the Victoria Albert Museum. Founder of Image of the Black in London Galleries a series of gallery tours , the Project Director and Chief Evangelist of The John Blanke Project: an Art and Archive project celebrating John Blanke the Black trumpeter to courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII, co-convener of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies What’s Happening in Black British History series of workshops and founder member of the Black Presence in British Portraiture network

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