ELIZABETH W. GIORGIS
Associate Professor, Critical Theory and Criticism, Center of African Studies at Addis Ababa University
ABSTRACT
Elizabeth W. Giorgis will discuss her recently released book, Modernist Art in Ethiopia (Ohio UP, 2019), the first monographic study of Ethiopian visual modernism within a broader social and intellectual history. Professor Giorgis will engage with the complications of writing art history in non-Western contexts, with particular attention to the agents and institutions that engendered and reproduced the fundamental organization of Ethiopian artistic practice—and that gave rise to modernism and modern subjectivities.
BIO
Elizabeth W. Giorgis is Associate Professor of Critical Theory and Criticism, as well as Art History, at the College of Performing and Visual Art at Addis Ababa University. She previously served as Director of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies and Dean of the College of Performing and Visual Art at Addis Ababa University. She is the editor and author of several publications including “Perspectives on Ethiopian Modernity and Modernism,” a special issue in Northeast African Studies (Vol 13.1; 2013), co-editor of “Charting Ethiopian Modernity and Modernism,” a special issue on Ethiopian art and literature in Callaloo, Journal of the African Diaspora (Vol 33.1; 2010) and Gebre Kristos Desta: The Painter Poet (Institute of Ethiopian Studies, 2006), the first catalogue of contemporary art published in Ethiopia. She has curated several exhibitions including Time Sensitive Activity (2015), an exhibition of Olafur Eliasson’s work, and contributed to the exhibition catalogs of Addis Ababa: The Enigma of the New and the Modern (2013) and Revolutionary Motherland or Death: Students’ Work during the Derg Regime (2012) Giorgis studied History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University and Museum Studies at New York University. Her foundational book, Modernist Art in Ethiopia was published in early 2019 by Ohio UP/Swallow Press.
This event is free and open to the public. If you need accommodations to participate in this event, please contact icm@cornell.edu as soon as possible.
