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Syncretic Topographies: The Portraits Of Seydou Keïta, Sara L. Marion

Art & Art History ETDs

This thesis examines the writing, exhibitions, and discourses that have accompanied the translocation of Seydou Keïta's photographs from the center of the French Sudan to the core of the New York art world. Between 1948 and 1962. this Malian photographer established a commercial portrait studio in the city of Bamako, then the capital of the French Sudan and now the capital of Mali. He produced a body of portraits that catered to the aesthetics of a West African clientele on the verge of colonial independence. Nearly forty years later. these photographs resurfaced in the exhibition Africa Explores: 20th Century African …