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Salah Hassan is Goldwin Smith Professor and Director of the Africana Studies and Research Center, and professor of African and African Diaspora art history and visual culture, Department of History of Art and Visual Culture, Cornell University. He also served as Chair of History of Art, Cornell University between (2000-2005). He is also a curator and art
critic. Prior to joining Cornell faculty, Hassan taught in the
Department of History of Art at the State University of New
York at Buffalo, the Department of History of Art at the University
of Pennsylvania, and the Department of Art History and General
Studies in the College of Fine and Applied Art in Khartoum,
Sudan. He is founder and editor of NKA:
Journal of Contemporary African Art, and serves as consulting
editor for African Arts and Atlantica.
Born in the Sudan, Hassan received his Ph.D. in 1988 and an
M.A. in 1984, from the University of Pennsylvania, after graduating
with a B.A. (honors) in 1978, from the University of Khartoum.
He authored and edited several books including Unpacking
Europe (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2001) Authentic/Ex-Centric:
Conceptualism in Contemporary African Art (2001), Gendered
Visions: The Art of Contemporary Africana Women Artists
(1997), Art and Islamic Literacy Among the Hausa of Northern
Nigeria (1992). He contributed to several anthologies including
The Art of African Fashion (1998), Women, Patronage,
and Self-Representation in Islamic Societies, edited by
D. Fairchild Ruggles (1999); and Reading the Contemporary:
African Art from Theory to Marketplace edited by Olu Oguibe
and Okwui Enwezor (1999). He is also contributing author to
Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa (1995), co-editor
with Philip Altbach of The Muse of Modernity: Essays on Culture
as Development in Africa (1996). In addition, he authored
numerous articles on contemporary African art and culture published
in professional art journals and magazines. Hassan is currently
working on a book manuscript entitled, Khartoum School: The
Making of the Modern Art Movement in Sudan.
Hassan served as guest curator of several exhibitions and authored
and contributed to their companion catalogues and monographs
including: Authentic/Ex-Centric:
Africa in and out of Africa, at the 49th Venice Biennale;
and most recently Unpacking Europe at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
in Rotterdam, an international exhibition organized by the city
of Rotterdam, The Netherlands, as part of its programs as a
Cultural Capital of Europe (2001-March 2002); <Insertion>:
Self and Other, an exhibition at Apex Art Gallery in New York,
in April 2000; Modernit(ies) and Memor(ies) an exhibition at
the 1997 Venice Biennale, in Venice, Italy, Seven Stories about
Modern African Art a major exhibition opened September 1995
at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, U.K. as part of Africa
95, and traveled to the Malmö Kunsthall in Sweden in January,
1996; Ousmane Sow at the Pont des Arts, Paris, France, hosted
by the Mayor of Paris' office, March 22-June 22, 1999; TransAfrican
Art, at the Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, Florida in 1997;
Visions of a Sudanese Diaspora as the First Johannesburg Biennale
of International Contemporary Art (February 28- April 30, 1995)
and participated in the Biennale's Conference BUA! Emergent
Voices in the Arts. New Vision: Recent Works by Six African
Artist, and exhibition held at the Zora Neale Hurston National
Museum of Fine Art, Orlando, Florida, in conjunction with the
Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association in November,
1995; Creative Impulses/ Modern Expressions: Four African Artists,
an exhibition of contemporary African art held at the Herbert
F. Johnson Museum of Art in 1993; The Art of Rashid Diab: A
Retrospective 1983-1993, (1994) opened at the Museum of the
National Center of Afro-American Artists, Boston (April 1994-August
1994), and traveled to Greensboro, NC; Hassan was a member of
the Executive Council of Africa 95, the British-based festival
of African arts during the autumn of 1995 in the U.K. with outreach
to Africa, Europe and the U.S.
Hassan also curated and edited the companion catalogue for Gendered
Visions: The Art of Contemporary Africana Women Artists an exhibition
featuring works by six contemporary African and African Diaspora
women artists opened January, 25, 1996 at the H.F. Johnson Museum.
He also curated and edited the catalogue of Genders and Nations:
Artistic Perspectives a multi-media and video installations
by Shirin Neshat and Chila Kumari Burman opened at the Herbert
F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell
University in April 1998. He served as a member of the International
Artistic Committee of the Third Bamako Biennale of African Photography,
Mali, in December, 1998 and a guest speaker of the International
Symposium of the 7th Cairo Biennale in December, 1998. Most
recently, Hassan served as consultant and contributed the major
essay for the catalogue of the exhibition of the sculpture project
of Ousmane Sow on the Battle of the Little BigHorn opened in
Dakar January 24, 1999 and traveled to Paris March 19, 1999.
Hassan is a member of the International Advisory Council of
the Museum of Contemporary Art in Kumamoto, Japan. He served
as a consultant to several museums and projects including: African
Voices Project, The National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian
Institution (1994-present); The Nubia Gallery of The Royal Ontario
Museum in Toronto (1991-1992); The Africa Hall opened at the
Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago (1990-1992); co-organizer,
with Cornell Council for the Arts of African Signs in Contemporary
African American Art, a three day symposium and performance
at Cornell University funded by the National Endowment for the
Arts, and served as consultant to the 1996 Images of Africa
Festival of Arts in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Hassan is the recipient of numerous awards and grants including
the J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in Art History and
the Humanities for 1992-1993, the Toyota Foundation Award for
1995, a Rockefeller Foundation grant to support exhibition and
publication in 1995, an Andy Warhol Foundation grant in 1996
and most recently the Prince Claus Fund's award and Andy Warhol
Foundation Grant in 1998 to support the publication of NKA:
Journal of Contemporary African Art. In January, 1999 he received
a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to support the creation
of a Database on Contemporary African Artists and Networking,
which is implemented by Cornell Institute of Digital Collections,
in collaboration with Africana library, Cornell University.
He received several grants from the Ford Foundation to organize
the African participation at the 49th and 50th Venice Biennales,
and to organize a major conference entitled Visualizing Blackness
held October 12-15, 2000 at Cornell University. The conference
coincided with a major exhibition entitled Blackness in Color:
Visual Expressions of the Black Arts Movement (1960-Present)
which is curated by Hassan and inaugurated at the H. F. Johnson
Museum of Art August 26-October 22,2000, and will travel other
to museums in the United States.
For more than ten years, Hassan has taught graduate and undergraduate
courses on African and African American art history, African
Aesthetics, African Cinema, Blacks in Film, Contemporary art
and theory. Hassan has mentored and successfully supervised
a considerable number of graduate students' thesis at the masters
and doctoral levels, in addition to undergraduate students.
Hassan been an active member of several professional associations
including: The Arts Council of the African Studies Association
(ACASA),USA, The African Studies Association, U.S.A., and the
College Arts Association (CAA), U.S.A.
© Copyright: Salah Hassan
Last update: July 2006
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