Visiting Scholar Professor Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz will be giving a public lecture titled “Made to be Seen: Kongo Graphic Writing as a Basis for Rethinking the Transmission of Knowledge.”

Professor Martínez-Ruiz is the Tanner-Opperman Chair of African Art History in Honor of Roy Sieber at the Department of Art History at Indiana University. He is also Senior Research Associate in African Art and Its Diaspora at the University of Oxford and Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town. Martínez-Ruiz received his PhD and MA from Yale University and a BA from the University of Havana, and a BFA from the San Alejandro Academy of Art. His research areas include: African and African diaspora art, aesthetics and culture; graphic writing systems; rock painting; Latin American and Caribbean visual culture, art and aesthetics; theories of the avant-garde; contemporary theory. His is the author of Kongo Graphic Writing and Other Narratives of the Sign (Temple University Press, 2013), Faisal Abdu’Allah: On the Art of Dislocation (Atlantic Center of Modern Art Press, 2012), and an editor of Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and his Worlds (Yale University Press, 2007), for which he received the College Art Association Alfred H. Barr Award.

Professor Martínez-Ruiz's three-day visit at the School of Art and Art History will include additional events addressing issues on teaching and curating arts of Global Africa. Please see https://events.uiowa.edu/86150