VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

The Menil Collection presents an Illustrated Lecture - Dinka: Legendary Cattle Keepers of Sudan, An Evening with Photographers Angela Fisher & Carol Beckwith, Wednesday, May 25, 2011, 8:00 p.m. The illustrated lecture, starting at 8:00 pm, is free and open to the public.

These renowned photographers have devoted their lives to documenting the rapidly vanishing way of life and cultures of the indigenous people of Africa. “These cultures possess a wealth of knowledge,” Beckwith and Fisher have said. “It is our life passion to document and create a visual record of these vanishing ways of life.”

Turning their lenses to the great pastoralists of the Sudan, they present a story that started with their first visit to this region thirty years ago in DINKA: Legendary Cattle Keepers of Sudan. Granted acceptance among the Dinka people, who call themselves “jieng” and “mony-jang” meaning “men of men”, Beckwith and Fisher capture this rare symbiosis between man and animal with more than 130 astonishing photographs.

Called “gentle giants” because of their extraordinary height and from the gray ash they cover themselves with–made from cattle dung used as protection against flies and lethal malarial mosquitoes–the Dinka’s devotion to their cattle is legendary. Given his cow upon puberty, a Dinka boy will take his cow’s name and will care it for its entire life, training its horns into their curved shape that they mimic in standing pose, reciting poetry in the cow’s honor, watching over it, and keeping it fed and from harm. Determined to document their way of life, Beckwith and Fisher give readers a chance to walk alongside these regal cattlemen in DINKA.

Following the lecture, Beckwith and Fisher will conduct a Q&A with the audience and be sign copies of DINKA, available from the Menil Bookstore.

Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher have spent a lifetime studying the people of the African continent, and have published their photography in a series of 14 acclaimed books, as well as major magazine features in National Geographic, Time, Life, Vogue, Marie Claire, and Elle. They have produced four documentary films and exhibited and lectured widely at such venues such as the American Museum of Natural History, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, FotoFest Houston, and London’s Royal Geographical Society. They last appeared at the Menil in 2000, to celebrate the publication of the double-volume “African Ceremonies”.

Beckwith and Fisher currently are completing their pan-African study of the art of body painting for a book entitled “Painted Bodies”, to be published by Rizzoli in 2012.