KONGOKING : Workshops

24 March 2015: Cécile Fromont's lecture on "The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the kingdom of Kongo"

Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the west central African kingdom of Kongo practiced Christianity and actively participated in the Atlantic world as an independent, cosmopolitan realm.

Drawing on objects, images, and documents, Cécile Fromont examines the advent of Kongo Christian visual culture and traces its development across four centuries marked by war, the Atlantic slave trade, and, finally, the rise of nineteenth-century European colonialism. By offering an extensive analysis of the religious, political, and artistic innovations through which the Kongo embraced Christianity, Fromont approaches the country's conversion as a dynamic process that unfolded across centuries.

(http://uncpress.unc.edu/books/12811.html)

Cécile Fromont is Assistant Professor of Art History at Chicago University (http://arthistory.uchicago.edu/faculty/fromont)