Cape Verdean Identity in Contemporary Art

Join leading Cape Verdean-descended contemporary artists and scholars working in the field and museums to hear about how cultural identity and other intersectional identities are expressed various media of artmaking. Moderated by Ymelda Rivera Laxton, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art & Community Projects at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, this free, online program is a unique opportunity to learn more about artistic expression of the Cape Verdean diaspora, and is offered as a companion to the Museum’s Cape Verdean Contemporary project.

About the speakers:

Historian/filmmaker Claire Andrade-Watkins, PhD, a second generation Cape Verdean American, is an interdisciplinary scholar of African and African American history with a focus on Cape Verdean American history, Post-colonial French and Portuguese-speaking African cinema, cinemas of the Africana diaspora, and Black American film/filmmakers. She is the founding Director of the Fox Point Cape Verdean Project, a community-based research initiative created in 2007, and President of SPIA Media Productions, Inc., a production and distribution company founded in 1998 specializing in media from the Africana Diaspora. Dr. Andrade-Watkins is the first academic tenure track professor of color in the college, and the first Full Professor of color in Visual and Media Arts before migrating to the Institute for Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies.

Born in1964, Providence, Rhode Island, Christian Gonçalves graduated from Rhode Island College in 1993 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Concentrating in sculpture while minoring in philosophy, he developed vocabulary of imagery that he drew from his exposure to the metaphysical, as well as symbolist art. He makes sculpture and mixed media artworks. By applying abstraction, Gonçalves tries to create works that are static in their presence yet fluid in their form; shapes evocative of atmosphere and presence that are part of an ambiguous thread.

Sandim Mendes (b. 1986) is a Cape Verdean artist born and raised in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Her artworks are a direct result of this upbringing, investigating the concept of identity within these various cultures. Through photography, performances, textile, drawings, printmaking and installations, she produces work that deals with intersecting layers of personal and political histories. Sandim has exhibited widely, and has held artist residencies in Lisbon, Dresden, and Iceland, among other prestigious locations.