For Michael Jackson (1958-2009)

I can’t go on said his heart;
Fairy of the silken shirt
I must stop cried his soul;
Vagabond of our lost world
“This is it” teased the small voice;
Incandescent shooting star

ART/world pulled from 234Next

I am sure some of you who have been reading my ART/world column in 234Next newspaper have been wondering what happened. Well, our engagement has been called off because of irreconcilable differences. But who knows, our online matchmaker may succeed in getting us back together. I will return to more regular postings here on Ofodunka. And yes, I will be seeing the Mami Wata show presently at the National Museum of Africa in Washington DC, and will post my thoughts on the show soon.

"Unbounded" at Newark Museum of Art

Martin Puryear, Untitled, 1997-2001 (Photo Courtesy: Newark Museum)


I finally got round to seeing Unbounded: New Art for a New Century show at the Newark Museum. And I must say right away that it is a terrific exhibition not only because of the quality of the works on show, but more important to me is its suggestion of viable model for curating contemporary art in a museum context.
There is a reason Newark is my favorite museum. Actually two: first is that it is one of the most progressive older museums in the US, and this is manifest in the diversity of its collection and combined display of fine art and design works in its galleries. And it has a wonderful curator in the person Christa Clarke who oversees the museum’s collection of African art and art of the Americas.


Gonkar Gyatso, My Identity, 2003 (Photo Courtesy: Newark Museum)


Owusu Ankomah, Movement #36, 2002 (Photo Courtesy: Newark Museum)

But what is it about the curatorial approach to Unbounded? The show draws on the strength of the Museum’s commitment to promoting the “art of our time,” and is the result of truly collaborative work among four curators/departments, Christa Clarke (Arts of Africa), Ulysses Dietz (Decorative Arts), Katherine Anne Paul (Arts of Asia) and Beth Venn, the curator of American Art. While each curators selected works--most made in the past decade--that speak to various departmental interests, the show's key is in the "transitional" works (such as Wang Jin’s Dream of China, 2005, an ethereally transparent, embroidered “Dragon Robe”, the labels of which were jointly written by two different curators. In the label of this work, and others like it, you see how experts from different areas of art look at, think about, and analyze works of art. This approach proposes, it is quite clear, that the scholarship can be the richer when people look beyond their intellectual cubicles. Which is to say that art scholars need to take a walk outside!, unbounded. The show then is as much about breaking down boundaries in our perception of contemporary artistic practices as about rethinking how curatorial departments function within the discursive space of the museum.

It is almost as if the organizers adamantly avoided the kind of loud, outsized confections you see in many contemporary art shows. Which is great, for this exhibit is quietly impressive, beginning with first object you encounter right at the entrance, Martin Puryear’s Untitled (1997-2001), a wood sculpture piece at once suggestive of archaic animal life and an indeterminate fructiform. It ends even stronger with Bill Viola’s Dissolution (2005) and Sue Williamson’s Better Lives I and II (2003). While Viola’s work shows a man and woman enacting as it were the primordial, sacral, entanglement between life and water, that most powerful of natural forces, Williamson’s are studio video portraits of African immigrants locked in an ocular contest with the viewer while amazingly installed sound tracks narrate their stories of struggle, of dispossession, and exile and the challenges of their South African domicile.

Sue Williamson, Better Lives I and II, 2003 (Photo Courtesy: Newark Museum)


Bill Viola, Dissolution, 2005 (Photo Courtesy: Newark Museum)

Unbounded includes several African artists, including Williamson, William Kentridge, Pieter Hugo, Senzeni Maresela, and Rossinah Maepe (South Africa); Victor Ekpuk, and Yinka Shonibare (Nigeria), Owusu-Ankomah (Ghana), Sokey Edorh (Togo), Wosene Kosrof (Ethiopia), Magdalene Odundo (Kenya), Samuel Fosso (Central African Republic), and the anonymous dressmaker who designed a printed wax dress with (anti-)female circumcision motifs for the Malian actress/activist, Fatoumata Coulibaly. Come to think of it, the fact that all the works in the show come from the museum’s permanent collection says so much about its commitment to contemporary African art

ART/world: Okwui Enwezor's Curatorial Excellence Award

My friend and colleague Okwui Enwezor received the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, "Curatorial Excellence Award" on April 22. This week's ART/world celebrates this event, and Okwui's exemplary career. Here are some of the photos from the award reception at Gotham Hall, NY. It occurred to me that not since Documenta11 in 2002, had this many from our circle of friends convened for a wonderful evening!


The artist Isaac Julien, who presented Okwui for the award. Photo: Chika Okeke-Agulu


Mark Nash of Royal College of Art (left), Salah Hassan (center); Uchenna Enwezor, Carina Ray, and Okwui. Photo: Chika Okeke-Agulu


Ute Meta-Bauer of MIT, and Susan Ghez of the Renaissance Society. Photo: Chika Okeke-Agulu


Director and Choreographer Bill T. Jones (center). Photo: Chika Okeke-Agulu

ART/world this week on Cecil Skotnes

This week in ART/world, I follow up on the brief Cecil Skotnes memorial I posted here last week. But I realized that the brevity of the posting failed to capture the depth of my appreciation of Skotnes' art and life. Not that the ART/world version does! Click HERE to read.

Responses are most welcome.

ART/world: The National Theatre, Lagos and Erhabor Emokpae

Here is this week's ART/world installment on the recent controversial restoration of the National Theatre (Lagos) sculptural friezes designed by the Nigerian artist Erhabor Emokpae (1934-1984). Let me say is again that what happened to Emokpae's work is unacceptable. It is despicable. This is one moment you wished there is an art police and justice system, so you could haul the perpetrators to face an art judge!

In Memoriam: Cecil Skotnes, 1926-2009

I am saddened by the news of the death of Cecil Skotnes, one of the most influential African modernists. A man whose artistic production, particularly in the area of printmaking and painting is as prodigious as his work as courageous teacher. It is impossible to write a history of South African and African art of the 20th century without due acknowledgment of Skotnes' role in establishing that pioneering institution, the Polly Street Art Center which provided training and tutelage to the generation of black artists that emerged in the 1950s and 60s South Africa, in the scorching shadow of the Apartheid.


Cecil Skones, Burnt Land series: Giant Bird between 2 Scarecrows 1998 (Courtesy: ArtThrob)

Or his equally important role as a founding member of the Amadlozi Group, the group of artists that advocated, arguably for the first time, the recognition by contemporary artists of a specifically South African ancestral heritage thereby upturning centuries of denigration of native South Africa traditions and cultures. Or his support for the establishment of the Community Arts Project in Cape Town. Given the place of the initiatives and institutions Skotnes helped establish in the struggle against and eventual vanquishing of Apartheid (The CAP for instance), he must be counted among the "quiet" heroes of that age.

In life Skotnes was a giant of an artist; in death he has become a veritable ancestor; he has joined the Amadlozi. I am grateful for his life.