On the occasion of Thus Masked, the World has a Language, please join us on August 16th at 11 a.m for a conversation between Jadine Collingwood, Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Constantine Petridis, the Rita Knox Chair and Curator of Arts of Africa at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Taking the exhibition Thus masked, the world has a language as a point of departure, Collingwood and Petridis will explore a vital element often absent when masks are encountered in Western art institutions: activation. In many African cultures, the term “mask” encompasses far more than the object itself—it speaks to movement, ritual, and embodied presence.
Together, the curators will examine themes of decontextualization, performance, and transformation, considering both what is lost when masks are removed from their original contexts and what new possibilities diasporic artists have forged in the wake of that rupture.
The conversation will be moderated by Scott Vincent Campbell, Midwest Programs Manager for Independent Curators International.
Speaker Biographies:
Jadine Collingwood is Pamela Alper Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Chicago. At the MCA, she has curated numerous projects, including solo exhibitions with Caroline Kent, Martine Syms, Gary Simmons, and Nicole Eisenman. She is currently developing Slow Dance, a group exhibition on performance planned for Fall 2026.
Constantine Petridis (Ph.D. in art history, Ghent University, Belgium, 1997) is the Rita Knox Chair and Curator of Arts of Africa at the Art Institute of Chicago. In addition to articles and chapters in more than seventy journals and books, Petridis is the author of South of the Sahara: Selected Works of African Art (2003), Art and Power in the Central African Savanna (2008), and Luluwa: Central African Art Between Heaven and Earth (2018). His publications for Chicago include the edited volumes Speaking of Objects (2020), The Language of Beauty in African Art (2022), and, with Hendrik Folkerts and Felicia Mings, Malangatana: Mozambique Modern (2021).
Scott Vincent Campbell (b. 1983) is an artist, arts administrator, and curator from New York, NY. He earned a BA in Fine Art from Haverford College in 2005, and an MFA from The University of Chicago in 2022. Campbell’s work has been exhibited across the US at institutions such as Library Street Collective in Detroit, MI; and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York, NY., and was the first Ford Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. He currently lives and works in Chicago, IL, where he also serves as the Midwest Programs Manager for Independent Curators International.
Juillet 31, 2025
