The dramatic vision and delicate balance of composition found in Adona's photographic works were developed while working with painter Rozzell Sykes. Her vision was literally changed. The awareness of light, shadows, colors, textures, tones and balance had changed. Soon she began creating with paint, stark images with the feel of Japanese simplicity. [Alisa Adona]'s paintings showed a freshly textured view and an exciting new eye in the Los Angeles art world. Over time, she was compelled to capture what she saw through the lens of a camera, ultimately making photography her new love.
One of the things attracting tourists has taught us is to value the habit of preservation. We have to depend on devoted scholars and archeology diggers and always, tenacious individuals like Dr. Walter Roth. He was a medical man of German stock who moved to Guyana by way of Australia and was the moving spirit in the rise of Georgetown's museum of natural history. As a youth I made many trips to this museum and was fascinated by its presentation and displays; for instance the diorama of gold-digging operations in the far interior, the lighted fish tanks with fish such as the blood-thirsty pirai, a lifelike representation on the wall of the world's biggest freshwater fish, the arapaima, caught in Guyana. A huge live anaconda pans have all but vanished.
In 1996 the city of Bristol celebrated its maritime past by focusing on key explorers while forgetting to mention their involvement in transatlantic conquests, and in particular in the slave trade. This partial amnesia led to a local controversy and, as a result, Black and White liberals together with the local authority organised an exhibition in 1999 on Bristol and the Slave Trade. A year later, the exhibition was transferred from the Bristol Museum to a different site and became a permanent part of the display in the Bristol Industrial Museum. This article analyses the ways in which the period of the transatlantic slave trade was officially represented and perceived by visitors to the Slave Trade Gallery. The paper examines the politics of memory by trying to answer key questions concerning Bristol's commemoration of the past in a context in which multiculturalism was a hotly debated issue.
In 1984, the association opened an expanded Historical Museum at the Miami-Dade Cultural Center in downtown Miami. This 40,000-square-foot facility includes a permanent exhibition that traces the history of South Florida and the Caribbean, a temporary exhibition gallery that features several new exhibitions each year, a theater and classroom area for variety of educational programs, and storage areas for the museum's extensive collections of artifacts and archival materials, including books, manuscripts, maps and more than one million photographs related to the region. In recent year, the Historical Museum has directed increasing attention to Miami's role as a gateway of the Americas. To explore Miami's multifaceted connections with the Caribbean and Latin America, a new program series, Miami: The Gateway City, was introduced in Spring 1999. The objective of the 12-month series is to use the museum as a central forum for public dialogue about current issues facing Miami and as a space for related artistic presentations.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
295 p., Charged with acquiring objects for a new museum, the Prices kept a log of their day-to-day adventures and misadventures, constantly confronting their ambivalence about the act of collecting, the very possibility of exhibiting cultures, and the future of anthropology.
