On May 29-30, 2023, a congregation of artists, filmmakers, writers and scholars will return to Paris to mark the tenth anniversary of "Black Portraiture[s]: Imaging the Black Body in the West" in locations that gave birth to this cultural phenomenon.

From its origins at Harvard University in 2004, the conference took on its current name when it convened at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in 2013. It attracted more than 400 people and spread to other places, including the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the University of Paris Diderot (Paris 7).

The 2023 anniversary event will continue to reflect on the audacity of memory, imagination and aspiration, with which cultural producers have inscribed African and Diaspora African cultural bodies, politics and styles in Europe and throughout the worlds they touched. Black Portraiture[s] - revisited in Paris - will meditate on the endurance of blackness amid a perilous present shaped by controversies over migration and nativism.

The anniversary event of Enduring Blackness will examine the historicity and rich panoply of black imagery and their articulations in important aesthetic conventions within European and global art forms. It will also trace the resounding resonance of the African diaspora in performative, literary and academic media – from film, music and opera, to sculpture, scholarship, painting and photography, to architecture, textile arts and fashion - like these modes of expression are committed to various audiences and commons. Additionally, it will examine the history and politics of black artistic and curatorial advocacy. Through broad conversations about the black body (and body politic) imagery in the West and around the world, the tenth anniversary of Black Portraiture[s] promises to continue its legacy of innovation in the fields of art, African studies , history and critical culture.

More information on the event can be found here.