ART HISTORIES SERIES - Caravans of Gold: Seeing Stories About Medieval West Africa

Camel caravans crossed Africa’s Sahara Desert during the Medieval Period (8th-16th century), carrying things, people, and ideas between towns on the desert’s northern and southern fringes. Fragments excavated from those sites today help us to deepen our understanding of the past and to see Medieval art in new ways. This talk will take a close look at several artworks from Western Africa, that were featured in an award-winning exhibition at Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art entitled Caravans of Gold, considering the stories they tell us about Africa’s connections within a global Medieval world. The presentation by the exhibition’s curator Kathleen Bickford Berzock also provides an in-depth look at the curatorial practices she and the Block Museum team needed to create to in order to build an exhibition on a topic that’s been left out of art history and museums.

Red Line Service is led by people with a lived experience of being unhoused. Red Line Service wields art world resources to build community, generating the sense of belonging and mutual care essential to securing and retaining housing. We collaborate with artists and cultural institutions to expand access to the art world, avowing that art can break the bonds of ingrained social roles and structures and forge new realities in which all can flourish.

Red Line Service: Art Histories is a series of lectures and conversations presented as part of Art Design Chicago Now, an initiative funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art that amplifies the voices of Chicago's diverse creatives, past and present, and explores the essential role they play in shaping the now.

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A meal will be provided.