In celebration of International Women's Day, MoAD presents Tell Me More: Scholarly Voices From the Diaspora on three Saturdays in March (3/10, 3/17, 3/31).

This series is designed to bring different scholars to MoAD who will present on a variety of topics related to the African Diaspora. These Member Only events create a bridge of conversation between scholars and the community. All talks occur on Saturday mornings 10am -12pm in the Salon. Seating is limited. Producer Amina Mama, presents documentary film The Witches of Gambaga, an extraordinary story of a community of women condemned to live as witches in Northern Ghana. Ms. Mama is a published feminist, researcher and scholar, has lived and worked Nigeria, South Africa, Britain, the Netherlands and the USA. She spent 10 years (1999-2009) working across the African region to establish the University of Cape Town’s African Gender Institute as a continental resource dedicated to developing transformative scholarship bringing feminist theory,  teaching and activism together, and is founding editor of the African journal of gender studies, Feminist Africa.

MoAD Members Only

Please RSVP to education@moadsf.org

This conversation about blackness, gender, sexuality and revolution in contemporary Cuba follows Jafari S. Allen’s groundbreaking ethnography-- ¡Venceremos? The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba. This book is a rare and engaging study of race, desire, and belonging among Blacks in early-twenty-first-century Cuba, as the nation opens its economy to global capital. Allen highlights small but significant acts of struggle for autonomy and dignity in everyday practices in Havana and Santiago de Cuba—including Santeria rituals, gay men’s parties, hip hop concerts, the tourist-oriented sex trade, lesbian organizing, HIV education, and just hanging out.

Jafari S. Allen is editor of the Black/Queer/Diaspora special issue of GLQ: A Lesbian and Gay Studies Journal. Allen is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology at Yale University, where he also teaches in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies program and the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies program. Professor Allen’s ethnographic and critical work has been published widely, and he is currently conducting research for a new book project, Black Queer Here and There: Sociality and Movement in the Americas, a transnational analysis of black queer sexuality, subjectivity, and resistance in and between North America, the Caribbean and South America.Visit his website at www.jafariallen.com.

Free with MoAD Admission

In celebration of International Women's Day, MoAD presents Tell Me More: Scholarly Voices From the Diaspora on three Saturdays in March (3/10, 3/17, 3/31).

This series is designed to bring different scholars to MoAD who will present on a variety of topics related to the African Diaspora. These Member Only events create a bridge of conversation between scholars and the community. All talks occur on Saturday mornings 10am -12pm in the Salon. Seating is limited.

Patricia A. Turner presents “Crafting Revenue: Who Profits From Arts in Africa and the Diaspora?”   Turner is the Vice Provost of Undergraduate Studies and Professor of African and African-American Studies at the University of California, Davis, where she has been on the faculty since 1990.  A nationally known folklorist, her scholarly interests include rumor, quilting, and media portrayals of African Americans.  Dr. Turner’s books include Crafted Lives: Stories and Studies of African-American Quilters (2009); Whispers on the Color Line: Rumor and Race in America with Gary Alan Fine; (2001); Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture (1994) and I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture (1993). 

MoAD Members Only

Please RSVP to education@moadsf.org

Join MoAD favorite Kirk Waller for stories from Africa and the American South. Kirk will also get you moving with an interactive demonstration of mime, gesture and movement techniques essential to the art of storytelling.

Kirk Waller has been involved in theater, public speaking, mime and, of course, storytelling for over 20 years. Kirk performs in schools, libraries, churches, storytelling festivals, businesses and special events. He has a lifelong love of story, literature and the arts.

Folktales Across the African Diaspora is generously supported by a grant from the James Irvine Foundation

Free with MoAD Admission.

Freedom Songs

An afternoon of Spirituals, Civil Rights, and Freedom Songs from Southern Africa with Vukani Mawethu Choir

Join us for our monthly program series, Sacred Music Sunday Fellowship. These performance and lecture programs examine the historical sources of contemporary forms of religious and sacred music throughout the African Diaspora.

Vukani Mawethu is a nonprofit multiracial choir which sings the freedom songs of Southern Africa, primarily of South Africa in Zulu, Xhosa, Sethu, and English, and also gospel, spirituals, labor and civil rights songs linking peoples in the U.S., South Africa, and around the world.

This program is generously supported by a grant from The James Irvine Foundation

Free with MoAD Admission.

Choose Paint! Choose Abstraction! launches MoAD’s Curator’s Choice exhibition series by featuring nine influential Bay Area artists who over several decades, starting in the 1970’s, consistently chose abstraction over figuration as their preferred approach to art making. Dr. Lizzetta Le-Falle Collins, organizer of the exhibition, former MoAD Director of Curatorial Affairs and noted scholar of African American art has elected to inaugurate MoAD’s new visual arts exhibition series with over thirty five paintings by Robert Colescott, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Mike Henderson, Joan Brown, Dewey Crumpler, Jay DeFeo, Arthur Monroe, and Squeak Carnwath. Choose Paint! celebrates their influence on the Bay Area art scene and examines the aesthetic beauty of their work, the expressive power of the medium and the cross cultural exchange between this selected group of black and white artists who helped define the West Coast abstract art movement. The exhibition is on view from March 23 to September 23, 2012. Complimentary Admission.

THIS PROGRAM HAS BEEN POSTPONED UNTIL A LATER DATE. In association with the Wells Fargo Heritage Center, MoAD presents a day of Genealogy, Heritage, and Ancestry Research. 

WORKSHOP: Genealogy | 12-4pm 

Join Lisa Lee and gotgenealogy.com  in the Education Center for a special workshop entitled Ask a Genealogist. The genealogists will sit down with workshop participants, one-on-one, to help them with their research, research plans, assist them in finding additional resources they may have overlooked, and show them advanced ways to use some online database/resources, such as Ancestry.com, HeritageQuest and GenealogyBank.com.

Prior registration is required to sign up for a time slot with a genealogist. If you would like to register and receive a copy of the blank pedigree chart, please send an email request to egessel@moadsf.org.

Professional genealogist, Lisa B. Lee is the owner of GotGenealogy.com, where she publishes a monthly newsletter, the Got Genealogy Gazette, which provides timely and useful information to help genealogists make the most of their online genealogical searches. Join her on Facebook.

Wells Fargo Heritage Center at MoAD presents programs focused on cultural preservation including a speaker’s series, workshops, and classes on oral history and genealogy. Visitors can utilize resources on site such as films, books, computer stations and interactive activities. Wells Fargo Heritage Center was established with the generous support of Wells Fargo Bank. 

Free with MoAD Admission.

In celebration of International Women's Day, MoAD presents Tell Me More: Scholarly Voices From the Diaspora on three Saturdays in March (3/10, 3/17, 3/31). 

This series is designed to bring different scholars to MoAD who will present on a variety of topics related to the African Diaspora. These Member Only events create a bridge of conversation between scholars and the community. All talks occur on Saturday mornings 10am -12pm in the Salon. Seating is limited.

Rekia M. Jibrin presents The Wretched of the School System: Education’s Practice of Violence. Rekia is a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley and a researcher at the Henderson Center for Social Justice at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Law School. Her current work is a study of violence prevention school practices, state repression, and economic conditions that ‘epidermalize violence’ on poor children in American public schools.

MoAD Members Only

Please RSVP to education@moadsf.org

This event has been postponed and will be rescheduled in the near future.

Many contemporary scholars have documented the worship of female Yoruba deities like Oshun, Yemonja, and Oya, in the Americas and the Caribbean. These goddesses, like their male counterparts, were carried across the Atlantic by male and female devotees, and, when necessary hidden in the worship practices demanded by the Christian Church. What has been less studied is how these deities adapted to the European colonial mores and worldviews forced on their African worshippers. This presentation explores the ways that the roles of female deities in the African context has been translated, reduced, transformed and continued in their encounters with Europe and America, primarily using the examples of Oshun, and Uhammiri/Oguide/Mammy Water.

Arisika Razak, MPH is the Chair of the Women’s Spirituality Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Her teachings incorporate diverse spiritual traditions, women's health and healing, and multicultural feminisms, with a special emphasis on the spiritualities and cultures of women of the African Diaspora. An inner-city midwife of over twenty years, Arisika has led healing workshops and ritual celebrations for women for over three decades.

Free with MoAD Admission.