Recently added articles from African Arts:
New spaces for art and artists in Africa.(first word)
Jun 22, 2009; ... While new spaces and exhibitions of contemporary African and diaspora art are sprouting throughout the northern hemisphere, this globalizing phenomenon has had a certain spillover in Africa. But what is the nature of these new spaces down south? What messages do they project and whose ...
Tonye Victor Erekosima: October 23, 1940-August 1, 2008.(in memoriam)(Biography)
Jun 22, 2009; ... Tonye Victor Erekosima was born to Kalabari Ijo parents from Buguma City in the Niger Delta of Nigeria. His father, Chief Isaac Dagogo Erekosima, a paramount chief for twenty years, was directly descended from the Kalabari Chief Ikiri JohnBull, and his maternal grandfather was Amanyanabo ...
More on place, practice, and nationalist gestures.(dialogue)(Brief article)
Jun 22, 2009; ... Three issues ago (African Arts 41(3):10-12), we began a discussion of what it means for an artist to engage in an Africa-grounded practice, as opposed to a diasporic one. In this issue, Frank Ugiomoh and Bukky Gbadegesin take on Uche Okeke's Natural Synthesis and its metastasized forms ...
Art and nationalism in Nigeria.(dialogue)
Jun 22, 2009; ... Art history is an apt ground for the definition of national ideologies owing to its ability to probe the historical circumstance of the object. Modernist art history in Nigeria, however, is marked by its contestatory discourses. Uche Okeke's recognition of the value of inter-cultural ...
Response to F. Ugiomoh, "art and nationalism".(dialogue)
Jun 22, 2009; ... There is no disputing the fact that such artists as Onabolu and Enwonwu have been important to the development of modern art in Nigeria and were the first to experiment with modern artistic modes of cultural translation. However, I respectfully challenge Ugiomoh's claims that these ...
Dreams of home in expanding diasporas.(dialogue)
Jun 22, 2009; ... In the recent Dialogue discussion on nationalism and transnationalism in contemporary art in and out of Africa, Sidney Kasfir makes a reference to El Salahi's dreams of home from afar (p. 10). Steven Nelson identifies El Salahi's nostalgic reflections on a distant home as a "psychological ...
Calling home.(dialogue)(diaspora of African art)
Jun 22, 2009; ... In response to Kasfir et al., I would add that we ought to better historicize this moment of contemporary art turning from African to its diasporas. In the 1970s and 1980s, as art world discourse became more about the critique of institutions, some African artists sought to distance ...
Dollar Falls, transnational dynamics, and mediums of national art.(dialogue)(name of installation)(Critical essay)
Jun 22, 2009; ... My response to "[Dis]placement of National Art in a Transnational Artworld" is framed by the provocative mixed-medium installation Dollar Falls commissioned by the National Gallery of Zimbabwe (NGZ), Harare, for its fiftieth anniversary exhibition, January-February 2008. The large-scale, ...
Willie Cole's Africa remix: trickster and "tribe".(Critical essay)
Jun 22, 2009; ... [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Willie Cole (Fig. 1), like many African-American artists of his generation--those born or spending their early childhoods in the 1950s--reflects on the necessarily intertwined subjects of sub-Saharan Africa and the history of Africans in the Americas in his ...
Exile, memory, and healing in Algeria: Denis Martinez and La Fenetre du Vent.(Critical essay)
Jun 22, 2009; ... Fearing assassination by religious extremists, Denis Martinez (b. 1941), the Algerian-born artist and former professor at the Ecole nationale superieure des Beaux-arts in Algiers, fled Algeria and immigrated to France in 1993. He left behind a well-established artistic career as the ...
Embodying the Sacred in Yoruba Art: featuring the Bernard and Patricia Wagner Collection: a case study in museum practice.(Case study)
Jun 22, 2009; ... Every man lives in two realms, the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today ...
Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art.(exhibition preview)(Critical essay)
Jun 22, 2009; ... GRASS ROOTS: AFRICAN ORIGINS OF AN AMERICAN ART GIBBES MUSEUM OF ART CHARLESTON, SC AUGUST-NOVEMBER 2008 NATIONAL UNDERGROUND RAILROAD FREEDOM CENTER CINCINNATI, OH FEBRUARY s-APRIL 20, 2009 FOWLER MUSEUM AT ...
Guro masked performers: sculpted bodies serving spirits and people.(Critical essay)
Jun 22, 2009; ... There was great commotion at Zuenoula on Saturday, February 13, 1999. (1) The car park was emptied of vehicles, making room for colorful bunting and a shaded platform from which various political figures could harangue the crowd, offer political speeches, and propose catchy slogans. Among ...
Moms with guns: women's political agency in anti-apartheid visual culture.(Critical essay)
Jun 22, 2009; ... The cover image from Sechaba, an anti-apartheid magazine published by the African National Congress (ANC) in 1968 (Fig. 1), features a common subject embraced by artists and familiar to art historians across historical eras and geographical locations: motherhood. (1) Like other mother and ...
Creative reformation of African art traditions: the iconography of Abayomi Barber Art School.(Report)
Jun 22, 2009; ... [FIGURE 2 OMITTED] Since the colonial period, many African artists have been caught in a dilemma (Adepegba 1996) which, up to the 1960s, was phrased as a two-world disposition between tradition and modernity, and reflected in literary works. (1) During this period, the fervor of ...
Dak'Art 2008.(2008 Dak'Art Biennale of Contemporary African Arts)(Critical essay)
Jun 22, 2009; ... Dak'Art 2008 Musee de l'Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire and Galerie Nationale, Bamako May 9-June 9, 2008 Dakar, Senegal First Impressions Kinsey Katchka [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] The 2008 Dak'Art ...
Vlles Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie.(name of photography exhibition)
Jun 22, 2009; ... Vlles Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie Bamako, Mali November 24-December 23, 2007 [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Situated "In the City and Beyond," the 7th African Rencontres biennial embraced an all-encompassing photographic territory that could ...
Between Union and Liberation: Women Artists in South Africa 1910-1994.(Book review)
Jun 22, 2009; ... Between Union and Liberation: Women Artists in South Africa 1910-1994 Edited by Marion Arnold and Brenda Schmahmann Hants, England, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005. 230 pages, 9 color plates includinXg cover, 45 black and white illustrations, 3 maps, index, bibliography. 60 [pounds ...
Guro: Masks, Performances and Master Carvers in Ivory Coast.(Book review)
Jun 22, 2009; ... Guro: Masks, Performances and Master Carvers in Ivory Coast by Eberhard Fischer Munich: Prestel (in collaboration with the Museum Rietberg [Zurich]), 2008. 519 pp., 560 illustrations (approximately 400 in color), 2 color maps, bibliography. US$90.00, cloth [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] ...
Africa in Paris: on expressive cultures from the early twentieth century to the present.(Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image)(Black France: Colonialism, Immigration, and Transnationalism)(Paris Africain: Rhythms of the African Diaspora)(From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture In and Out of Africa)(Book review)
Jun 22, 2009; ... Africa in Paris: On Expressive Cultures from the Early Twentieth Century to the Present. From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture In and Out of Africa by Steven Nelson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 304 pp., 8 color, 101 b/w photos. $50.00 cloth [ILLUSTRATION ...