Shannen Hill
African Art
Office: 4220 Art-Sociology Building
Email: shill@umd.edu
Telephone:
(301) 405-7720
Shannen Hill teaches courses that span the continent and reach across the Atlantic to include African-derived arts in Brazil and the West Indies . Her courses and research include a range of visual culture, including fine art, home decor, mass media, performance, architecture, and new media. The periods covered run from ancient times (as early as 27,000 BCE) to the present, and topics include patronage, trade (among Africans and with Europeans and Asians), customary use (whether religious, political, domestic, or a combination thereof), resistance to colonial suppressions, modernism, liberation movements, and contemporary markets. Post-colonial approaches are emphasized in her classroom and research since Africans have long been engaged with the world beyond the simplistic boarders that words like “tribe” connote. Authors and political theorists with African roots are given primacy of place, but all writers invested in post-colonial studies are valuable to our discussions and work. Graduate students have nominated her for a teaching award and many have found their writing and argumentation skills have improved with her help.
South African contemporary art is Professor Hill's research focus. She has lived, worked, and traveled in South Africa for more than three years and she maintains excellent relationships with colleagues — artists, archivists, gallerists, fellow professors — in South Africa. Her major publications focus on political imagery that centers on heroic personages and African-led liberation. Her first book, Biko and Black Consciousness in South Africa Art (forthcoming), has been generously funded by the Getty Institute, among others. The book engages three types of portraiture to cement the lasting impact of Bantu Stephen Biko, one of Africa's greatest sons, upon South Africa as it moved from apartheid resistance to democratic reform. One form of portraiture — autopsy images — is examined in her article “Iconic Autopsy: Postmortem Portraits of Bantu Stephen Biko” in the quarterly African Arts (2005). An earlier article (2000) argued for the subversive presence of Kongo ritual arts within Simon Kimbangu's Christian practice in the Belgian Congo (1920). Her second book will be a monograph on a great modernist of South Africa , Ezrom Legae (1938-1999). Other research engages water imagery in contemporary African art.