African and Oceanic Traditional Arts: Contributions to Post- Impressionism. By Dr. Daniel Mato
Sunday Lecture Series 2022 (Virtual Event)
March 27, 2-4pm PDT
Indigenous arts throughout the world played an important role in shaping the course of modern art and the path to abstraction. From the last quarter of the 19th century, European artists encountered, in new ethnographic museums, traditional arts from far corners of the world or themselves travelled to new lands, returning home with objects of extraordinary variety and innovation that astonished artists and collectors. This lecture examines how the traditional arts of Africa and Oceania (the South Pacific islands) served as catalysts of change for artists that led to the Post-Impressionist movements of Cubism, German Expressionism, Surrealism and eventually the modern works of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.
General $30 | Members and Students $25
Get the series of 4 lectures: $90 General Admission; $75 Gallery Members and Students (buy series tickets by March 4).
Images (L-R) Dr. Daniel Mato pictured with Henry Moore sculpture. Headshot of Dr. Daniel Mato. Courtesy of Dr. Daniel Mato. Seated couple, Mali, Dogon People, 18th – Early 19th Century, Wood & metal, Gift of Lester Wunderman, 1977, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Accession Number: 1977.394.15
Dr. Daniel Mato is Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of Calgary. His research focus has been on the arts and cultures of traditional societies in Africa, Oceania, Pre-Columbian Central and South America, and North America (Aboriginal). He has held positions in the museum and gallery world such as director of the art gallery of the University of Manitoba and as curator at the Detroit Institute of Art, the Glenbow Museum, and the Museum of Making in Calgary. As an invited curator he has organized major exhibitions in Europe (Munich, Stuttgart, Freiburg, Hamburg, Amsterdam) and in Canada and the United States. Dr. Mato has conducted research in Africa beginning in 1968 continuing to his last research trip in 1997 including fieldwork in Mali, Liberia, and Ghana. An author of many research texts and exhibition catalogues, Dr. Mato continues to consult with museums and to write for them on their collections of African Art.