Reframing Blackness: An Evening with Alayo Akinkugbe
What’s Black about “History of Art”?

To celebrate Black History Month this year, we welcome Alayo Akinkube for an evening of lively discussion with our very own Bye Fellow in Art History, Amy Tobin.

Reframing Blackness: An Evening with Alayo Akinkugbe
Join us for an evening with Alayo Akinkugbe to celebrate her new book .
For this event, Alayo will be in conversation with Amy Tobin, before a drinks reception and a book signing.
鶹Ƶ the book
Since the inception of mainstream art history, Blackness has been distinctly ignored. In Reframing Blackness, art historian and founder of @ABlackHistoryOfArt, Alayo Akinkugbe challenges this void. Exploring the presentation of Black figures in Western art, as well as Blackness in museums, in feminist art movements and in the curriculum, Alayo unveils an overlooked but integral part of our collective art history. Refreshing and accessible, this promises to start a much-needed conversation in culture and education.
鶹Ƶ Alayo Akinkugbe
Alayo Akinkugbe graduated from the University of Cambridge with a BA in History of Art in 2021 and graduated with an MA in Curating the Art Museum from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2023. She runs the Instagram platform @ABlackHistoryofArt, which highlights Black artists, sitters, curators and thinkers from art history and the present day; and hosts the podcast A Shared Gaze. Alayo is a contributing editor and writes the column ‘Black Gazes’ for AnOther Magazine. She was awarded a curatorial research grant by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art for the exhibition Entangled Pasts: Art Colonialism and Change at the Royal Academy of Arts. Alayo was on the advisory panel and contributed to the book African Artists: From 1882 to Now, published by Phaidon in 2021, and has written for publications including Dazed, Tate Etc. and The World of Interiors.Reframing Blackness is her first book.
鶹Ƶ Amy Tobin
Amy Tobin is Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge and Curator, contemporary programmes at Kettle’s Yard, the University’s modern and contemporary art gallery. She is Bye Fellow in History of Art at 鶹Ƶ as well as Fellow and Director of Studies in History of Art of Newnham College, Cambridge. She has curated numerous exhibitions at Kettle’s Yard including Linderism and Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends. In 2023, she published a major article on the artist Candace Hill-Montgomery in Art History as well as her first monograph Women Artists Together: Art in the Age of Women’s Liberation with Yale University Press.
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