Curator Talk: Margaret Nagawa

Maragaret Nagawa is the curator of Insistent Presence: Contemporary African Art from the Chazen Collection and a Ph.D. candidate at Emory specializing in contemporary African art. Her research focuses on sculpture and language, showing that artists center the human body in forging alternative definitions to the narrow categorizations of art, craft, and literature envisioned by colonial administrators. Nagawa’s work in curating the exhibition examines how artists have reimagined the human figure to pose questions about social and political histories, contested identities, and a possible future for how we relate to one another. This exhibition, which is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, is organized by the Chazen Museum of Art and presented by the Palmer Museum of Art. The Palmer Museum of Art’s presentation of the exhibition is overseen by Amanda Hellman, Director, with support provided by the Michael J. and Aimee Rusinko Kakos Dean’s Chair in the College of Arts and Architecture.