NSU Horizons Spring 2018

4 NSU HORIZONS African Presence Art Exhibition Hits 15-Year Milestone For the 15th year, the African Presence Art Exhibition kicked off Black History Month at NSU. This year’s theme was Back to Black: African Diaspora Influences on Art and Culture. A reception and fashion show at the Don Taft University Center opened the exhibition. The fashion show, “Styles Through the Decades,” highlighted African-inspired fashions from the past 100 years. The five-week art exhibition, displayed at the Adolfo and Marisela Cotilla Gallery at the Alvin Sherman Library, included 13 artists from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. The works reflected the artists’ cultural influences, evident in their use of African fabrics and their interpretation of world events. Nigerian artist George Edozie created Obiamaka , a fabric and metal sculpture, in reaction to the 2014 abduction of more than 200 girls in Chibok, Nigeria, by a militant Islamic group. The acrylic-on-tarp paintings of Jamaican-born artist Kofi Kayiga reflected the influence of African and Jamaican folklore and religious themes. “The artists were all of African descent, but from different parts of the world,” said Mara L. Kiffin, chair of the African Presence Organizing Committee, who started African Presence at NSU in 2004. “They all had this sense of black awareness within them- selves that helped them create these pieces that are influenced by African culture.” ¨ AROUND NSU Neither freezing temperatures nor hurricanes can stop “Andy,” a tiger shark tagged in Bermuda by scientists from Nova Southeastern University’s Guy Harvey Research Institute (GHRI) in 2014. Traveling 37,565 miles along the eastern coast of the United States and around Bermuda, the Bahamas, and Turks and Caicos, Andy is now the longest-tracked tiger shark on record and shows no sign of slowing down. His data transmitter has been continuously signaling for more than 1,240 days. “We are delighted with how long Andy has reported data, which has tremendous value for us as researchers,” said Mahmood Shivji, Ph.D., the director of NSU’s GHRI and a professor in the NSU Halmos College of Natural Sciences and Oceanography. “This amazing, nearly three-and- a-half-year track is revealing clear, repeated patterns in the shark’s migrations between summer and winter.” More than 150 sharks, including tigers, makos, and oceanic whitetips, have been tagged by the GHRI in the last decade. The data collected is used to study the migration patterns of these creatures. According to a paper by Shivji and his colleagues published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science , tiger shark migrations are heavily influenced by a shark’s physical characteristics, such as size, and environmental variations (e.g., water temperature and prey availability). “Tracking the migration patterns of sharks, like Andy, for extended periods of time allows us to better understand their behavior and habi- tat utilization, resulting in better knowledge on how to manage the species,” said Guy Harvey, Ph.D., artist and chairman of the Guy Harvey Ocean Foundation. Andy and other GHRI-tagged sharks can be followed online in near real time by going to nova.edu/sharktracking . ¨ The Energizer Bunny of Sharks African Presence kicked off Black History Month at NSU again this year.