Professor Suzanne Blier has received the ACASA Leadership Award from the Arts Council of the African Studies Association “in recognition of excellence, innovative contributions and vision in the fields of African and Diasporic Arts.” This award is given once in every three years at the Triennial Meeting of the association, a group that comprises art historians, curators, historians, anthropologists, and others engaging in African and Diaspora art history. Please join us in congratulating Suzanne...
Across the US, the UK and Australia, the month of March is celebrated as Women’s History Month. Each year, the Harvard Square Business Association commemorates Women’s History Month by proudly publishing an annual list of women business owners and directors, as well as political, civic, academic, cultural and non-profit leaders from across the Square and across the city.
This year, Professor Suzanne has been named in the category "City of Cambridge - Business and Neighborhood Association Leaders" for her local community activism.
In 2019, Suzanne Preston Blier, professor of African art at Harvard University and former president of CAA, published a major book on Picasso’s use of global imagery, Picasso’s Demoiselles: The Untold Origins of a Modern Masterpiece. In addition to its scholarship the book is groundbreaking for its reliance on fair use, the principle within US copyright law that permits free reproduction of copyrighted images under certain conditions. CAA led the way among visual arts groups in calling for...
The Dedalus Foundation is pleased to announce that Professor Suzanne Blier’s book Picasso’s Demoiselles: The Untold Origins of aModern Masterpiece (Duke University Press) is the winner of the 2020 Robert MotherwellBook Award. The award is given annually to a book that makes a significant contribution to thescholarship of modern art and modernism...
In Picasso's Demoiselles, eminent art historian Suzanne Preston Blier uncovers the previously unknown history of Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, one of the twentieth century's most important, celebrated, and studied paintings. Drawing on her expertise in African art and newly discovered sources, Blier reads the painting not as a simple bordello scene but as Picasso's interpretation of the diversity of representations of women from around the world that he encountered in photographs and sculptures. These representations are central to understanding...
“Clay—Modeling African Design” was recently curated by Suzanne Blier, Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and Professor of African and African American Studies, and Jessica Martinez, Director of Academic and Public Programs and Division Head, Research Curator of African Art Initiatives, Harvard Art Museum. The exhibition will be on display at the Harvard Art Museums through November 2021.
Picture it: Saturday afternoons in the late 1970s, on a train bound from Yale University to New York, artist Romare Bearden, jazz critic Albert Murray, and writer Henry Louis Gates , Jr. are bound in deep conversation, pontificating on the nature of jazz – not just as a form of music, but as a fundamental expression of the African-American vernacular. Jazz is not just a sound: it is a state of mind, a way of being, and seeing the relationship between the self and the world.
Now imagine that conversation found its way into a book and took form in a conversation of the visual...
