OPENING RECEPTION AND BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION

August 28th, 4-7pm

AMALIA AMAKI - MJ: IN BLUE TERMS

AUGUST 20 - SEPTEMBER 4
“MJ: In Blue Terms” is a series of visual poems about the man who was the most publicly watched and photographed celebrity in the world during his lifetime.  Amaki avoids the usual treatment of Jackson as music icon, international star, tabloid target, or fan idol, and presents him simply as a human being.  Photography on canvas, button-based fans, and mixed media works offer a unique glimpse of the performer through the eyes of the artist in images that she asserts "are not portraits, but snippets from narratives that contain clues to what the person was truly like."

Amalia Amaki is a multi-media artist, art historian, educator, film critic and curator who currently resides in Tuscaloosa, Alabama where she is a Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa since 2007. Amaki graduated from Georgia State University in Atlanta in 1971 with a B.A. degree in journalism and psychology. In 1980 she obtained a B.A. degree from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico in photography and art history, and earned her M.A. degree in modern European and American art and a Ph.D. in twentieth century American art and culture from Emory University in Atlanta in 1994. Dr. Amaki has taught art history at Spelman College, Morehouse College and Atlanta College of Art in Atlanta, Georgia; Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia; and North Georgia College and State University in Dahlonega, Georgia. In 2001, she became Curator of the Paul R. Jones Collection of African American Art at the University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware where she was on the faculty in the Art History and Black Studies Departments.

 Amalia Amaki's works of art can be found in numerous private art collections throughout the world, and are included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in Houston, Texas; the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, the Minnesota Museum of American Art in St. Paul, Minnesota; the University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware; the Albany Museum of Art in Albany, Georgia, the Hammonds House Museum in Atlanta, Georgia; and the Tubman African American Museum in Macon, Georgia, among others.