African and African diaspora art history and visual culture

Salah Hassan is Associate Chair of the Department of History of Art, professor of African and African Diaspora art history and visual culture, as well as Director of the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University. 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.

Current research includes:
Hassan is currently working on a book manuscript entitled, Khartoum School: The Making of the Modern Art Movement in Sudan.

Teaching:
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.

Books:
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).

Select Articles:
He has authored numerous articles on contemporary African art and culture published in professional art journals and magazines.

Memberships:
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.

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