Dr. Arturo Lindsay joined the Spelman College faculty in 1990 working in the Arts and Visual Culture department. He retired from the College in 2015.
Arturo Lindsay is an artist-scholar who conducts ethnographic research on African spiritual and aesthetic retentions in contemporary American cultures. His research findings are manifested in works of art, as well as scholarly lectures, essays and articles. Lindsay is a native of Colon, a seaport city on the Caribbean coast of the Republic of Panama. At age 12, along with his parents, he migrated to New York city and settled in Brooklyn.
Lindsay’s work is represented in important private and public collections nationwide and abroad. He has exhibited in major solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, Panama, Mexico, Germany, Peru, and Italy. Recent solo exhibitions include Retorno de las ánimas Africanas, at the Segunda Bienal Iberoaméricana de Lima, Salones de los Artistas Invitados in Lima, Perú.
Lindsay was one of 15 elite artists selected by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, to promote diplomacy as part of the new smARTpower initiative. As part of the project, Lindsay spent up to 45 days in Cairo, Egypt engaging in people-to-people diplomacy through the visual arts.
In 1994 Lindsay received a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest International Artist Award to establish a studio in AnimaPortobelo, a 16th century Spanish colonial village in Panama. This residency resulted in a major solo exhibition at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo in Panama City entitled Canto a la libertad de Africa a América. The exhibition traveled to Atlanta, was expanded, and opened in January 1996 under the title Animas, arcángeles y antepasados - Recent Work by Arturo Lindsay at Nexus Contemporary Art Center.
Between 1996 and 1998 the exhibition traveled to Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis and Diggs Gallery at Winston-Salem State University. Recent group exhibitions include The Shape of the Spirit, at Centro Culturale Man Ray in Cagliari, Italy; In Search of Balance: The ArtistScholar, Smithsonian Institution, Arts and Industries Building, South Gallery; The Ark of the Well Being, Plexus International, the Roof Garden at the Palazzo del Esposizioni in Rome during the World Food Summit; and Reaffirming Spirituality, El Museo del Barrio.
Lindsay has participated in a number of traveling exhibitions including Ceremony of Spirit: Nature and Memory in Contemporary Latino Art, organized by the Mexican Museum in San Francisco; and Art in Atlanta, organized by Artists-in-Residence International. The latter traveled to various cities in Germany and England between 1996 and 1997. His work also appeared in ES97 Tijuana, a major exhibition of Latin American art organized by the Centro Cultural Tijuana and shown in two other venues including El Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City.
As a scholar, Lindsay has lectured and published several essays on New World African religious, spiritual, and aesthetic retentions. In 1996 he edited Santería Aesthetics in Contemporary Latin American Art which was published by the Smithsonian Institution Press. In 1997 he won the Spelman College Presidential Award for Scholarship. In 1998, he participated in the panel discussion Contemporary Artists: Issues of Individuality and Tradition at the Perspective on African Art: Dialogue with “Tradition,” a colloquium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Arturo Fire.
In 1999, he won a Fulbright Senior Scholar award to conduct research on the manifestations of Black Christ figures in the Americas, teach a course on experimental art at the University of Panama, and to work with emerging self-taught artists of the village of Portobelo.
Dr. Lindsay is professor emeritus of art and art history at Spelman College. In 1990, he received a doctor of arts degree from New York University. The title of his dissertation was Performance Art Ritual as Postmodern Thought: An Aesthetic Investigation. He holds a master of fine arts degree in painting from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1975); and a bachelor of arts degree in Spanish and theater from Central Connecticut State University (1970).
D.A., New York University
M.F.A., University of Massachusetts
B.A., Central Connecticut State University