sylvester okwunodu ogbechie, associate professor

curriculum vitae

 specialization

Classical, Modern, and Contemporary African and African Diaspora Arts; Visual Culture, and Knowledge Systems Theory

email
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office
Arts 1143

phone (message)
805 893 8710

personal website
http://aachronym.blogspot.com/

  B.A., M.A. University of Nigeria
Ph.D. Northwestern University

Ogbechie has an extensive scholarly background in Classical, Modern, and Contemporary African and African Diaspora arts. His research evaluates Alternative Modernities, and the colonial and postcolonial conventions of representation in the arts and visual cultures of African and African Diaspora populations. His articles and reviews have appeared in African Arts, Arts Journal, NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Revue Noire, Ijele, Farafina, and several important art history anthologies. His manuscript, Ben Enwonwu: Aesthetics and the Mythic Imagination is under review and he is working on an edited volume titled Igbo Studies in the 20th Century. A curator and consultant for many premier international exhibitions of modern and contemporary African art, Ogbechie has also published extensively in art exhibition catalogs, lectured at major American and international venues, and has been cited by the Smithsonian Institution, and by the City of Philadelphia for his contributions to the 2004 Philadelphia Echoes of Africa cultural program. Ogbechie is the Founder and Director of Aachron Knowledge Systems, which includes the publishing imprint Aachron Editions and Critical Interventions, a journal of African Art Theory and Criticism. Ogbechie organized and coordinated the First International Nollywood Convention and Symposium (Los Angeles, June 2005) that evaluated new media in contemporary African Visual Culture from the perspective of the internationally acclaimed Nigerian Video Film Industry. He serves as editor for Nka, African Arts and Ijele, the principal journals of contemporary African arts and visual culture.

undergraduate courses

Black Aesthetics and the Politics of Representation: African American Arts
(Undergraduate Seminar)
Topics in African Art: Modern and Contemporary African Arts (Undergraduate Seminar)
I am Not Myself: Art and Identity in Africa (Freshman Seminar) 

graduate seminars

2002      Rethinking African Art History: Objects, Discourses, Futures
2003      Alter/Native Modernisms in African and African Diaspora Arts