The African Lookbook with Catherine E. McKinley
10/28/23 • 50 min
Today's guest is Catherine E. Mckinley, a curator and author of four critically acclaimed books, most recently The African Lookbook: A Visual History of 100 Years of African Women , which won the inaugural Eiger Foundation Prize for Best African Photobook. An exploration of Africa's photographic history, fashion, trade history, and African women's selfhood, the book features works from The McKinley Collection, her personal archive representing African photographies from 1870 to the present. Works from The McKinley Collection have been shown in international museums and galleries. She lives in New York City.
Catherine and I spoke about building the McKinley collection, clothes as monuments, how her work on textile traditions informed the compilation of the book, the impact of the camera and sewing machine on Africa's cultural and economic landscapes, the place of African Women in the archive and more.
Host: Siima Itabaaza
Editing: Wana Benjamin
Patreon: patreon.com/KutimbaWithSiima
Email: [email protected]
Today's guest is Catherine E. Mckinley, a curator and author of four critically acclaimed books, most recently The African Lookbook: A Visual History of 100 Years of African Women , which won the inaugural Eiger Foundation Prize for Best African Photobook. An exploration of Africa's photographic history, fashion, trade history, and African women's selfhood, the book features works from The McKinley Collection, her personal archive representing African photographies from 1870 to the present. Works from The McKinley Collection have been shown in international museums and galleries. She lives in New York City.
Catherine and I spoke about building the McKinley collection, clothes as monuments, how her work on textile traditions informed the compilation of the book, the impact of the camera and sewing machine on Africa's cultural and economic landscapes, the place of African Women in the archive and more.
Host: Siima Itabaaza
Editing: Wana Benjamin
Patreon: patreon.com/KutimbaWithSiima
Email: [email protected]
Previous Episode
Africa Fashion at The Brooklyn Museum with Ifeanyi Awachie
Welcome to Kutimba With Siima!
In the Premiere Episode, I'm joined by Ifeanyi Awachie to review the landmark Africa Fashion exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. Ifeanyi is a Nigeria-born, Atlanta-raised writer, curator, filmmaker, and scholar.
Africa Fashion is the largest-ever exhibition charting the global impact of African fashions from the 1950s to date. The exhibition, first shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London last year, features over forty designers and artists from Africa and its diasporas. Over 180 items, including garments, sketches, catwalk footage and music, depict how Africa’s influential sartorial language has been crafted.
We discuss how we felt about certain curatorial decisions, what we enjoyed and disliked, what we would have done differently, the legacies of the exhibition and more.
Host: Siima Itabaaza
Editing: Wana Benjamin
Patreon: patreon.com/KutimbaWithSiima
Email: [email protected]
Next Episode
Papermaking and Materials as Witnesses with Kelly Taylor Mitchell
Kelly Taylor Mitchell is an artist and educator living and working in Atlanta, GA. Her multidisciplinary practice centers oral history and ancestral memory, real and imagined, woven into the fabric of the Africana Diaspora. Kelly's work is deeply invested in labor intensive making, slowness, and home-spun passed down processes.
We discussed how she conceptualizes and creates her pieces, the significance of food and materials, and rooting her artistic practice in celebration and joy.
Host: Siima Itabaaza
Editing: Wana Benjamin
Email: [email protected]
Patreon: patreon.com/KutimbaWithSiima
Dieu Donné: https://www.dieudonne.org/
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