Art as Landscape

Andrea Frohne has spent her career investigating the visual landscape of African culture, arts, cinema, and space. Her 2015 book, The African Burial Ground in New York City: Memory, Spirituality, and Space, explores the visuality of New York City’s African Burial Ground, a 6.7-acre swath in lower Manhattan where more than 15,000 mostly enslaved Africans and African-Americans were buried throughout the 18^th century.

Frohne, an associate professor of art history who holds joints appointments in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts, the School of Art + Design, and African Studies, shared some of her life, work, and worldview with Ohio Today.

What’s your earliest memory?
I remember my newborn sister coming home from the hospital, and I remember a wall-sized Max Ernst painting that hangs in Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

You just got home from a trip – what’s the first thing you do?
Begin working.

List some books that have changed your life.
Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism and E.M. Forster’s Room with a View. From early on, I can say the Nancy Drew detective series.

What do you like to do on a rainy day?
Listen to music from Mali and look at art books about German Expressionism.

What’s the one food you could never bring yourself to eat?
Marmite.

What’s the most beautiful place you’ve ever been?
The edge of the Sahara Desert in southeast Morocco, the train ride between Sienna and Florence through Tuscany, and the train ride across the Norwegian Arctic Circle.

What’s your favorite smell in the whole world?
Rocky Mountain pine trees

Which of the Seven Dwarfs is most like you?
Happy, because I am.