View from the Pier

Cheryl Finley, 46, is Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art and Visual Studies at

My springboard to a deep appreciation of others’ culture was being raised with a strong sense of my own Irish ancestry. That legacy has informed my identity and aspirations—among them, as a seeker, student of human behavior and writer. Similar interests—as well as a shared passion for photography—have flowered from Cheryl’s own cultural roots. I think you’ll find this discussion with Cheryl of heritage–from the perspectives of scholar, teacher, artist and human being–both fascinating and powerful.

Tour Group, Elmina Castle, 2005

Cheryl: Cultural heritage tourism is a popular form of leisure travel practiced by people who are interested in journeying to places that have historical or spiritual significance for how they define themselves culturally, ethnically, or racially. It is thus an identity-based form of leisure travel that links people living in the present with the sites and places of significance for their ancestors/ancestry and for understanding the past.

Usually practiced by groups of people defined culturally, ethnically, or racially, cultural heritage tourism often involves a form of pilgrimage, where groups return to some of the same places year after year as a way of affirming and reaffirming identity, that is, their place in the present as it relates to the past. Examples include Irish Americans journeying to Ireland, Italian Americans traveling to Italy, and African Americans traveling to Ghana’s slave forts and castles.

But cultural heritage tourism is not necessarily a new phenomenon. In the case of African Americans traveling to Africa, I’ve also used the term ‘roots tourism’ to describe this identity-based form of travel, where its practitioners are seeking to find out more about their cultural heritage, their roots, where they came from. The term ‘roots tourism’ obviously references Alex Haley’s famous novel Roots, published in 1976 and produced as the first television miniseries in 1977. This book and media event spawned the second significant wave of African American heritage tourism to Africa and consequently renewed scholarly interest in genealogy.

The first wave took place between the late 1950s and early 1960s when African American writers, artists and political thinkers were inspired by African nations that were gaining freedom from colonial rule. Popular leaders like Kwame Nkrumah, the first Prime Minister of Ghana, and Leopold Senghor, the first President of Senegal, appealed to African Americans who were fighting for their own civil rights and making statements about black power. Some of the pioneering roots tourists include Maya Angelou, Malcolm X and Tom Feelings. More recently, Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s popular PBS documentary series African American Lives about the science of genealogy, has promoted a new generation of cultural heritage tourists ready to trail blaze new ground laid for them by the promise of genealogical research.

Meg: In 1999, you traveled to Ghana to conduct research into the historic castles and dungeons of Cape Coast and Elmina. Could describe what led you to undertake that trip?

Cape Coast Castle Slave Ship Exhibit

Cheryl:

As part of my dissertation field research in 1999, I traveled to Ghana to study an exhibition in Cape Coast Castle in which a small portion of the hold of a slave ship had been recreated based on a popular late eighteenth century engraving, “Description of a Slave Ship.” The image showed the manner in which enslaved Africans were packed in life-threatening, crowded conditions for the economic benefit of slave traders during the Middle Passage from West Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean.

The slave trade is often referred to a ‘triangular trade,’ where ships carrying exchange goods departed from European or American ports for the West African coast to trade for African captives. The second part of their journey, from West Africa to the so-called New World was the longest and most treacherous. This was called the Middle Passage and surviving cargoes of African captives were unloaded and prepared for sale. The final leg of the journey, of the triangle, was the return from the Americas or the Caribbean to the starting point, where sugar, rum, tobacco, rice and other products produced by slave labor on plantations, were sold to finance new slaving voyages.

The most enduring image that has come to stand as a visual reminder of the Middle Passage is ‘Description of a Slave Ship’ and you’ve probably seen it many times before in textbooks and history exhibits.

Cape Coast Castle Museum, 1999

I have called that image ‘the slave ship icon’ for the way in which it was circulated by the hundreds of thousands by abolitionists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to bring about public and parliamentary support to end the slave trade in 1807 by the United Kingdom and in 1808 by in the United States, and ultimately the cessation of chattel slavery in the British Caribbean in 1833 and in the United States in 1863.

My use of the term ‘slave ship icon’ is further supported by the continued popularity this image enjoys today in the hands of black artists, writers and exhibition designers. My study of the installation at the Cape Coast Castle Museum affirmed the centrality of this image for diasporic Africans in search of their roots. While my own journey was ultimately an example of cultural heritage or ‘roots’ tourism, the initial impetus was the underlying fieldwork.

Meg: Did you have any expectations of the journey and if so, how were they met?

Cheryl: This was my first trip to Africa and my first trip to Ghana, naturally, so I was very excited! At last, I was going to the ‘motherland’! I would finally see where my ancestors may have come from and I might even meet someone related to me! But I had to remain focused on the work at hand. Initially, I planned to center my fieldwork on the exhibition in Cape Coast Castle, but I came to realize prior to my arrival that I should also investigate the historical and contemporary implications of the African American preoccupation with Africa as a symbolic site of memory, Africa as the ‘motherland’. After all, this was something that I, myself, I had dreamed about since the mid-1980s, when I first caught sight of the continent across a hazy sea from the southern tip of Spain while on my junior year abroad.

W.E.B Du Bois Center, Accra

I also had studied the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Kwame Nkrumah and Edward Bruner, whose perspectives further expanded upon the implications of Ghana’s place as a site of memory for African Americans in the development and practice of cultural heritage tourism. Consequently, the W.E.B. Du Bois Centre for Pan African Culture and the Kwame Nkrumah memorial, both in the capital city of Accra, were important sites for me to consider in addition to the exhibition at Cape Coast Castle. Conversations with scholars like Saidiya Hartman, who had traveled previously to the castles and dungeons, further impressed upon me the importance of examining the phenomenon of cultural heritage tourism.

I also didn’t expect that it would be so easy to have access to so many forts off the beaten track, in between Accra and Cape Coast as well as beyond Elmina. I traveled there with the friends I met at Panafest, a performing arts festival, and a driver that we hired. The journeys to these sites, which are infrequently visited by tourists, were probably the highlight of my trip. This was due to the fact that these forts seemed to function less as World Heritage Monuments for the communities that lived around them and more as buildings that were integrated into their daily lives. That is to say, tourism wasn’t their main function or source of income.

For example, at Fort St. Sebastian in Shama, which is about 30 minutes past Elmina, portions of the fort were used for a post office, community meetings, and regularly scheduled neighborhood activities. So, this fort, built by the Portuguese between 1520 and 1526 with a long history of involvement in the slave trade, now had a vital role for the community living around it, while still serving as a place where tourists might visit. And when I was there in 1999, renovations were underway to convert some of the upper rooms, which historically would have housed slave traders or colonial governors, into lodging spaces for contemporary visitors. This practice, while perhaps appealing from the standpoint of tourism revenues, was and continues to be frowned upon by cultural heritage tourists and their allies living in coastal Ghana, as it disrespects the memory of the enslaved Africans who would have been held in the dungeons below.

Meg: What were the most significant experiences of this trip for you—could you address from a spiritual, emotional and professional perspective?

Cheryl: It was hard to separate the personal from the professional, that is, not to study and interpret different sites and behaviors without checking in with my own emotions. Overwhelming feelings of sadness engulfed me as I first caught site of the rocky coastline on the way to Cape Coast. I didn’t expect to feel that way, but I was told that I would. I never went into the water, although I love to swim; I just couldn’t swim there. My senses were heightened in the dungeons and I had to make frequent short trips in and out in my assessment of each space.

For my own research, the interactions with the people I met comprise one of the most meaningful experiences of the trip: the interviews that I made with visitors to Cape Coast and Elmina as well as interviews made with museum and site managers, local inhabitants, artists and tour guides. I planned my arrival in Ghana to coincide with Panafest, the biennial Panafrican Festival of Performing Arts. I participated in a related academic conference, where I met many scholars and recently transplanted expatriate African Americans with whom I worked and traveled during my five-week stay.

Nana Ocran, then curator of the Cape Coast Castle Museum, gave me a valuable behind-the-scenes tour of the exhibits, emphasizing the parts that were contested by the curatorial staff, local inhabitants and exhibitions designers, She pointed out how a disproportionately large part of the exhibition focused on the story of African American slavery and black leaders, mostly male, who helped to win freedom and civil rights (Frederick Douglas and Martin Luther King, for example) in the United States, while forsaking a larger focus on that national story of Ghana, its prehistory, independence and post-independence years.

New European Resort near Fort Good hope

In my exciting examination of the forts beyond Elmina, I traveled with a couple that I met at Panafest, who had a one-year old baby boy. They had just moved to Cape Coast from the United States to initiate a program of organic soybean farming and rare butterfly cultivation, both for export. Having their unique perspectives during our often-debilitating visits to these sites of human tragedy and horror was both uplifting and fortifying. In our five-day tour, we frequently stopped to take in the natural beauty of places like the Akansa Nature Reserve in the Western Region or nearby Busua Beach. What we found most perplexing was the close proximity of contemporary tourist destinations dedicated to leisure, like Busua Beach, and the nearby historic forts related to the slave trade, like Dixcove, literally, in some cases, just minutes down the beach on foot.

These kinds of connections with fellow travelers, curators and educators were a special added benefit that I didn’t necessarily anticipate, but that I had hoped would be the result of careful planning.

Meg: You have used the term “symbolic possession of the past.” Can you explain that generally and in the context of your journey to Ghana?

Memory Door of No Return, Elmina Castle

Cheryl: Symbolic possession of the past is a term that I introduced to describe some of the actions of cultural heritage tourists I met in Ghana and I first wrote about it in my article “the Door of (No) Return.” ⁽¹⁾ Symbolic possession of the past is defined as a peoples’ intrinsic need to take responsibility for the past, to (re)claim a particular slice of history that defines who they are. In the case of roots tourism to Ghana, the castles and dungeons as well as new performances practiced to consecrate the memories of the people who passed through their doors in the transatlantic slave trade, constitute some of the rituals and sites that are (re)claimed in this active practice of remembering in the present. Symbolic possession of the past is a survival tactic wherein victims of traumatic histories take hold of the past to ensure that its history is never forgotten.

Meg: Can you explain the term diaspora?

Cheryl: In my seminar, Contemporary African Diaspora Art, we seek to understand and define the term diaspora as it relates to people of African descent who are practicing artists. In this context, we consider the specific historical conditions of the slave trade, slavery and forced migrations, noting how those experiences have come to define a body of people who now find themselves scattered throughout the so-called New World.

Utilizing seminal essays by Stuart Hall and Brent Hayes Edwards ^{(2) (3)}, we consider the appropriateness of this label for African Americans and other dispersed black communities around the globe. The term diaspora, from the Greek meaning a scattering or sowing of seeds, today is used to refer to any people, defined ethnically, racially, religiously or culturally, who are forced or induced to leave their traditional homeland, being dispersed throughout other parts of the world, and the ensuing developments in their dispersal and culture.

Originally, the term diaspora was used to refer specifically to the populations of Jews exiled from Judea by the Babylonians, and Jerusalem by the Romans. Although ‘diaspora’ is a term first employed by Jews to identity their own unique experience, we study the usefulness of this term for African Americans and others who also identify with it, such as the recent ‘Katrina Diaspora,’ of New Orleans area residents who fled and relocated around the country after the Hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005. Finally, we consider the implications of such a designation and the way in which the sense of unity and belonging it assumes has begun to produce a specific kind of imagery that transcends local boundaries in order to embrace ideas of community that are more global and even universal.

Meg: Could you describe the seminar on Contemporary African Diaspora Art?

Local Artist with his depiction of Elmina Castle

Cheryl: Sure! It is the first seminar that I designed after finishing my Ph.D. and it is catered to advanced undergraduate students and graduate students. Recognizing that the work of artists of the African Diaspora was increasingly defining the cutting edge in the contemporary art world at the turn of the twenty-first century—at biennials and art fairs, in museum and gallery exhibitions, and in the art market—I sought to study the art historical circumstances that led to its widespread popularity and ability to set trends and define modes of contemporary aesthetic production.

To be sure, since the 1950s, projects of black liberation and empowerment have influenced the work of African Diaspora artists. Pivotal historic events, such as the Civil Rights Movement, the dismantling of colonial rule in Africa and the Caribbean, and the art that has resulted from the waves of secondary migration to Britain, Canada and the Americas, have beckoned black artists to reexamine issues of memory, identity, history and belonging.

Cheryl in from of Elmina Castle mural

Contemporary African Diaspora Art considers those artists who trace a visual genealogy of the African Diaspora through an active practice of mnemonic aesthetics.

Our focus is on artists and corresponding movements after 1960, but we also study the roots of this tradition in the beginning of the 20th century and in earlier periods through an examination of traditional art forms, including painting, sculpture and printmaking as well as the contemporary art practices of photography, installation, film, video and performance. One of the aims of the class is to conduct and sustain conversations about the diaspora within and with artists of the diaspora in real time. Through the use of the internet, students are encouraged to explore and exchange ideas about artistic practice with diasporic artists currently living and working around the Atlantic rim.

Meg: I came across the word sankofa in an article you published—can you define sankofa and speak to the concept both in the context of your study of cultural heritage tourism and your own personal experience?

Cheryl: Sankofa is an Akan word that means “one must return to the past in order to move forward.” Embodying a current of Akan philosophy that values the wisdom in learning from the past in building the future, it is often represented visually by the Adinkra symbol of the mythical sankofa bird that flies forward with its head turned backward while holding an egg (symbolizing the future) in its mouth.

The word sankofa came into popular parlance with cultural heritage tourists, as many of them defined their frequent trips to Ghana as symbolic journeys in which they were able to “go back and retrieve” what they had forgotten of their ancestral heritage, to, in the process, authenticate, reclaim and affirm their historical connection to the past, especially as it helped to make sense of their day-to-day diasporic condition.

Filming Documentary abotu Cape Coast Castle, 1999

As a symbol of national pride in Ghana, the sankofa bird is often pictured in advertising imagery and some tour groups operating trips between the United States and Ghana have taken the name Sankofa (Tours, Travels, Journeys, etc.) as a signal to potential clients of the brand of cultural heritage tourism services they offer.

The word sankofa really stuck with roots tourists and  came to represent the significance, if not the psychic and redemptive nature of their pilgrimages, of going back to their roots, after Ethiopian-born filmmaker Haile Germima’s 1993 release of the independent film Sankofa.  In the film, an African American fashion model on a photography shoot at Cape Coast Castle is taken back spiritually through the dungeons to a plantation in the Caribbean, where she is exposed to the psychic and physical brutality of chattel slavery.

She ultimately finds redemption through her growing revolutionary consciousness, embrace of community, and choice to join a group of Maroon slaves whose ultimate pursuit is freedom.

Meg: You also refer to the term lieux de memoire in discussing the historic buildings of Cape Coast and Elmina, and make the point that a given site can carry different meaning for different stakeholders. Can you explain?

Wreaths at Condemned Cell, Elmina Castle, 2005

Cheryl: The term lieux de mémoire, literally translated from the French as “sites of memory,” was introduced by French theorist Pierre Nora in the 1980s as part of Les lieux de mémoire, his seminal series on French national history published in seven volumes between 1984 and 1992. According to Nora, “A lieu de mémoire is any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which, by dint of human will or the work of time, has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community.” ⁽⁴⁾

Sites of memory can be places—archives, museums, cathedrals, palaces, cemeteries, and memorials; objects and practices—commemorations, generations, mottos, and rituals; or concepts-inherited property, commemorative monuments, manuals, emblems, basic texts, and symbols. Important for our understanding of cultural heritage tourism in Ghana, lieux de mémoire impart a common “will to remember” and serve communities linked by shared culture and history “to stop time, to block the work of forgetting.” ⁽⁵⁾

Beyond the mere sight of Africa as a symbolic motherland, the physical and imposing sites of the castles of Cape Coast and Elmina and the forts along the coast are claimed by roots tourists as tangible and necessary memorials. These are some of the very few places where material evidence of the legacy of slavery still stands before their eyes and is available to be touched, walked through, and experienced with all of their senses and with the movement of their bodies through the space. The forts and castles are profound examples of lieux de mémoire, or places “where memory crystallizes and secrets itself.” ⁽⁶⁾

Nora’s work energized the field of cultural memory studies in the 1980s and 1990s by recognizing the relationship between memory and history through the places, practices and concepts that are remembered through collective engagement and acknowledgement.

Meg: Can you describe Ghana’s Joseph Project?

Cheryl: Taking its cue from 2007, which marked both the 50^th anniversary of Ghana’s independence and the 200^th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, the Joseph Project, blends a reiteration of the country’s Pan-Africanist roots with a bold reconsideration of the country’s ancestors’ part in the slave trade. Spearheaded by the remodeled Ghana Ministry of Tourism and Diasporan Affairs at Panafest in 2007, the Joseph Project is a roots tourism initiative aimed at ‘welcoming home’ its African diaspora by acknowledging how the historic slave forts and castles on Ghana’s coast are important sites for diasporic roots tourists. As I have mentioned, these cultural heritage tourists also maintain symbolic links to Ghana’s independence movement through the history of Pan-Africanism and the Civil Rights Movement.

The project is named for the biblical figure, Joseph, who was sold into slavery by his brothers only to rise victoriously to save his people from starvation. This biblical framing device points to the influence of Christianity in Ghana as a direct result of missionary work in Africa during the slave trade and colonialism. It also positions the ‘returning’ diasporic African as a Joseph figure, as one who has surmounted unimaginable odds to survive, succeed and return home to give something back to his community.

The Joseph Project uniquely includes a program of national healing and atonement for African complicity in the slave trade while broadly seeking to remap national memory through tourism, education and the establishment of new museums, monuments and rituals. The Joseph Project thus seeks to reconcile national memory with regards to the slave trade, while boosting roots tourism to Ghana and its popular sites of the slave trade and encouraging foreign (African diasporic) investment.

Meg: Cultural memory theory is an area of study for you—can you talk about what that means?

Memory Door of No Return, Goree

Cheryl: Cultural memory theory is a frame of critical analysis that considers at its core a society’s preservation of collective knowledge from generation to generation as a way of enabling future generations to reconstruct, if not reclaim cultural identity. Cultural memory is less about the accuracy of the remembered event and more about the active construction of a memory on the part of individuals in a society or cultural group and their need for the stories that they tell to themselves to make sense of the world they inhabit in the present.

Introduced by Jan Assmann to the archeological disciplines in the late 1980s, the concept of cultural memory builds upon previous work on social memory by the sociologists Maurice Halbwachs, who introduced the idea of collective memory, and Paul Connerton, whose work on memory and the rituals of the body also concerns collective memory. Pierre Nora’s work on place in the realm of collective memory, discussed earlier, also is in conversation with cultural memory theory.

Meg: You are now completing a book called Committed to Memory: The Slave Ship Icon in the Black Atlantic Imagination. Can you talk about the book?

Cheryl: For several years, my scholarly research and writing have been focused on visual representations of the Middle Passage. These representations stem from historical accounts of the transatlantic slave trade as well as from the related contemporary visual art practices associated with mnemonic aesthetics, museum studies, and public monument making. My manuscript, Committed to Memory: The Slave Ship Icon in the Black Atlantic Imagination, is a visual and cultural history of the most famous image associated with the memory of slavery: the bold schematic engraving depicting the human cargo hold of a slave ship.

Published in 1789 by British abolitionists as Description of a Slave Ship, that dramatic black-and-white broadside was the leading piece of visual culture in the fight to end the slave trade. My book defines the image of the slave ship as an icon for its extraordinary political power during the period of abolitionism as well as for its continuing presence in the minds, memories and creative work of black visual and performing artists, museum professionals, writers, poets and cultural innovators in the twentieth century and today.

Maafa Rose window, New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church, Chicago

Committed to Memory studies the rich life of the slave ship icon not only to investigate how political and cultural innovators have articulated key events in African American and black Atlantic history, but also to probe the broader implications of mnemonic practices in contemporary art, popular culture and public history. My study of the exhibit at Cape Coast Castle in Ghana forms part of a chapter on public history that analyzes a number of similar exhibits that seek to recreate the horrific space of the hold of the slave ship almost as a way of reenacting the experience of the Middle Passage itself.

Some of these other exhibits can be found at the Field Museum in Chicago, the Charles Wright African American Museum in Detroit and formerly at the William Wilberforce House in Hull in England. In another example, the play “Slave Ship” by poet and playwright Amiri Baraka was performed on a set designed by Eugene Lee that was based on the slave ship icon and its rendering as a naval architectural plan. Scores of visual artists have made works that reference the slave ship icon and in my book I demonstrate how this image galvanized abolitionist efforts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and African Diasporic memory and identity in the twentieth century and today. As the artist Betye Saar remarked in an interview in 2001, “I even feel like its part of my DNA.” The lineage that I trace, moreover, describes the mechanisms by which the slave ship icon remains a haunting image of today’s public memory.

Meg: Afro-Caribbean art history is another area of your research and teaching. I understand you recently completed an extensive oral history interview with the contemporary Afro-Cuban artist Maria Magadalena Campos-Pons whose work reflects your own interest in autobiography and memory. Can you talk about those intertwined interests and what about them calls to you?

Cheryl: Building upon interviews I conducted with contemporary artists for Committed to Memory and the exhibition I curated 3×3: Three Artists/Three Projects: David Hammons, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Pamela Z, my next project is a monograph on Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons for the A Ver: Revisioning Art History series, which seeks to document the work of contemporary Latino artists through archived oral history interviews and monographs. As a scholar and curator, the perspective of the artist forms a key part of my research methodology, and interviews, oral histories and archives are essential to my primary source research. Especially in the fields of contemporary African, African Diaspora and Latin American art history, this investigative approach is crucial for building the archives available to future scholars. The Campos-Pons monograph is based on a series of oral history interviews that will be deposited in the renowned UCLA Oral History Archive.

For the monograph, I write about the artist’s life and practice in detail, beginning with her training in printmaking, drawing and photography in Havana and continuing to the present, where she is recognized as one of the leading contemporary installation and video artists working in the United States and globally. Born in 1959, the year that Fidel Castro came to power, Campos-Pons’s aesthetic interest in autobiography and memory form an artistic trajectory that allows me to chart the rise of contemporary Afro-Cuban art alongside the emergence of postmodernist practices of photography, installation, video and performance.

On a personal level, I’ve always been interested in autobiography and memory and the two seem almost inseparable to me; they share a symbiotic relationship. And autobiography and memory working together relate and make relevant personal experiences to the experiences of others. That is, autobiography and memory relate the personal to the group and this act serves to validate personal experiences in the larger world.

As a teen, I frequently wrote and performed autobiographically based soliloquies and poems for acting courses at Howard University Children’s Theater or for my high school acting classes. When I got to college, I penned my first autobiography, a short paper of maybe 20 pages, which is now lost, sadly. And in graduate school, I took a course on autobiography with Robert Stepto, renowned for his memoirs, and for my final paper, I began an autobiography, which I still work on to this day. It is called Pictures in My Mother’s House and each chapter is inspired by the memories evoked by the paintings, drawings, sculptures, and photographs that surrounded me and comforted me as I grew up. In a way, these works of art taught me how to see.

My parents met at Howard University in the mid-1950s and they both loved art. They frequently attended exhibitions in the Department of Fine Arts, renowned for artists, teachers and students like James A. Porter, Lois Mailou Jones, David Driskell and Elizabeth Catlett. And when the opportunity presented itself, my parents purchased works of art from exhibitions and art students.

Meg: I enjoy my own artistic endeavors—and being a “channel” for others. Do you practice photography today and do you view your roles as a teacher and scholar that of being a conduit for others’ artistry and awakening that interest in others?

Cheryl: Yes, I continue to make photographs today. My photographs from Ghana have been published with my essays about Ghana and cultural heritage tourism as well as, most recently, in the groundbreaking work, the Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade by David Eltis and David Richardson.⁽⁷⁾ My photographs of signage from the Katrina disaster were exhibited in Engulfed by Katrina curated by Deborah Willis and Hank Willis Thomas in 2006. I would hope that my photography and writing inspires intellectual and artistic creativity in others.

Cheryl Finley with Rosamond Ocancy, host during 1999 stay in Ghana

Many of my students are practicing artists and several of them have completed works of art (paintings, photographs and prints) as part of their written assignments. These works are often based on a set of historical circumstances that become meaningful to the student. For example, the assassination of two young inspirational leaders in the early 1960s within close proximity to one another—Patrice Lumumba, the first legally elected Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo, in 1961, and John F. Kennedy in 1963—inspired a photo-realist diptych by Monique Crine, an MFA painting student. Sarah Thornton’s book Seven Days in the Art World, assigned for my Art Market seminar, led BFA printing students Anya Graetch and Maggie Prendergast to make the intaglio print ‘Seven Days in the Art Network’ to accompany their presentation of the Thornton’s book.

Just last month, out of the blue, one of my students from last semester sent me an email to say how she had just come to realize the practical benefits of the museum studies seminar she took with me last semester. Now a graduate student at Teachers College at Columbia University, she is living near many of the museums and cultural centers we discussed in the class, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to name two, and now she regularly visits and appreciates the shows and programs that these cultural institutions offer. Although a lifelong resident of New York City, she didn’t take full advantage of these institutions until now. Another student once wrote in an evaluation that he didn’t realize that his grandparents were art collectors until he took my African American Art lecture. During a holiday visit with them, he came to find that they owned some of the very works we discussed in class! These are real life experiences that continue to touch me deeply and inspire my role as a teacher.

http://www.arts.cornell.edu/histart/finley.html

http://www.research.cornell.edu/VPR/CWC2212-09/progress/finley/

Articles by Cheryl Finley:

“To Travel in Her Shoes: Joy Gregory’s Cinderella Tours Europe, 1997-2001” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 21, Special Issue on Photography (Spring 2007): 48-59.

http://nka.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/2007/21/48

“Of Golden Anniversaries and Bicentennials: the Convergence of Memory, Tourism and National History in Ghana,” Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing, Vol. 7, Issue 2 (2007): 15-32.

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/berghahn/journ/2006/00000007/00000002

“Imagined History: the Work of Terry Adkins,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 19 (Fall 2004): 50-54.

http://nka.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/2004/19/50

Books and Journals I co-edited:

Cheryl Finley, Diaspora, Memory, Place: David Hammons, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Pamela Z. Edited with Salah M. Hassan (Prestel, 2008).

http://www.amazon.com/David-Hammons-Magdalena-Campos-pons-Pamela/dp/3791339133

Cheryl Finley, Strange Fruit: Lynching Visuality and Empire, edited with Brett de Bary and Salah M. Hassan. Special issue of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 20 (Fall 2006).

http://nka.dukejournals.org/content/vol2006/issue20/ Trade (Yale University Press, 2010)