Reframing Blackness: An Evening with Alayo Akinkugbe

Reframing Blackness: An Evening with Alayo Akinkugbe

Join us for an evening with Alayo Akinkugbe to celebrate her new book Reframing Blackness.

For this event, Alayo will be in conversation with Amy Tobin, before a drinks reception and a book signing.

About the book

Since the inception of mainstream art history, Blackness has been distinctly ignored. In Reframing Blackness, art historian and founder of @ABlackHistoryOfArt, Alayo Akinkugbe challenges this void. Exploring the presentation of Black figures in Western art, as well as Blackness in museums, in feminist art movements and in the curriculum, Alayo unveils an overlooked but integral part of our collective art history. Refreshing and accessible, this promises to start a much-needed conversation in culture and education.

About Alayo Akinkugbe

Alayo Akinkugbe graduated from the University of Cambridge with a BA in History of Art in 2021 and graduated with an MA in Curating the Art Museum from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2023. She runs the Instagram platform @ABlackHistoryofArt, which highlights Black artists, sitters, curators and thinkers from art history and the present day; and hosts the podcast A Shared Gaze. Alayo is a contributing editor and writes the column ‘Black Gazes’ for AnOther Magazine. She was awarded a curatorial research grant by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art for the exhibition Entangled Pasts: Art Colonialism and Change at the Royal Academy of Arts. Alayo was on the advisory panel and contributed to the book African Artists: From 1882 to Now, published by Phaidon in 2021, and has written for publications including Dazed, Tate Etc. and The World of Interiors.Reframing Blackness is her first book.

About Amy Tobin

Amy Tobin is Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge and Curator, contemporary programmes at Kettle’s Yard, the University’s modern and contemporary art gallery. She is also Fellow and Director of Studies in History of Art of Newnham College, Cambridge. She has curated numerous exhibitions at Kettle’s Yard including Linderism and Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends. In 2023, she published a major article on the artist Candace Hill-Montgomery in Art History as well as her first monograph Women Artists Together: Art in the Age of Women’s Liberation with Yale University Press.

Accessibility

• Buckingham House is located away from the college's main building, situated on Buckingham Road - directly opposite (across the road from) the turning circle/main entrance to the college.
• The entrance is accessible via a power-assisted door with a 'Push to Open' button. Past this door, in the entrance vestibule, is a set of manual glass double doors, which can be pushed or pulled.
• Gendered toilets and one accessible toilet are located at the rear of the conference centre, to the right of the servery.
• The lecture theatre is located at the very end of the foyer via manual wooden double doors with pull handles, leading to a vestibule.

• Turning left, there is a route to a lift, which provides access to the front row of seating and the stage.
• Use of the lift must be pre-arranged as a key is required to operate it.

See here for more information about College accessibility: https://cambridgemeetingspace.com/accessibility-information

Please get in touch if you have any further queries or requirements: womensart@murrayedwards.cam.ac.uk or call the Porter's Lodge at +44 (0)1223 762100.