Through The Wire: Weaving Resilience, Resistance, and Reimaging African Futures
January 27, 2025 - Andrea L. Mays
Andrea L. Mays, PhD., will deliver a public lecture, Through The Wire: Weaving Resilience, Resistance, and Reimaging African Futures, on Sunday, Feb. 16, 2 pm at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe.
Creative and expressive arts, and the politics of such arts, are extensions of the societies from which they emerge. Through telephone wire weaving, South African artists have mobilized traditional aesthetics, imaginative aspirations, and married impulses with function and form in creative expression to arrive at vibrant articulations of usable, and useful, art. This talk explores the relationship between art, resistance, and cultural resiliency through the original South African material form of telephone wire weaving. Dr. Mays unpacks the political landscape behind this unique cultural form, US history, and both popular and entertainment culture of the time, to explore the relationship between the arts and resistance across the Atlantic during South African Apartheid.
Andrea L. Mays, Ph.D., is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Africana Studies at the University of New Mexico. Her work focuses on African American and Black Atlantic Culture and Politics, Visual Culture Studies, and Black Feminist Studies. Her research interests include Black Atlantic expressions of critical and resistance politics in visual and literary culture. Mays’ forthcoming essays include "Allan Rohan Crite Reporting from the Pantheon of American Racial Politics" and "How to Recognize a Hostage Situation When You’re in It: The Politics of Blackness and Black Atlantic Being", which undertakes questions of Black peoples’ investments in nation-states politics, and the cost and limits of such investments.
Mays’ public scholarship includes essays and articles published in USA Today, The Albuquerque Journal, The Santa Fe Reporter, IKON Feminisms Commemorative Digital Archive, and the Morgan State University Global Journalism Review.
