Parallelisms in African and African American Art

48th Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association. Washington, DC. November 19, 2005.

      Jeff Donaldson, whose memory spurred the series of ruminations that you will endure in the next few minutes, was unambiguous about the centrality of African American art to the African American visual experience. While his legacy endures through his art, his pedagogical philosophy, and through the ideals that he catalyzed with the founding of AfriCobra among others, we must live with the pain that he did not live to realize his vision of forging a common front among contemporary artists of African descent. In a series of discussions that I had with him ten years ago in his studio in Washington, one of the key projects that he was interested in undertaking was a transAfrican art exhibition that would promote correspondence and interchange amongst artists of the African Diaspora.. In Donaldson’s scheme, AfriCobra, whose manifesto was to promote social responsibility and technical excellence in art, would initiate a transAfrican dialogue with several others: Koukura in Guadalope; Fwomaje in Martinique; Because in the Bahamas; Bogolan Kasabani in Mali, and the Zarianists in Nigeria.

This is African Art? Now You Confuse Me

      To the lay public, African art is synonymous with wood sculpture. For some, it invokes this eerie feeling that transports the mind to a liminal province and floods the imagination with images of fantastic, even phantasmagoric, masks that are adorned with unfamiliar appurtenances. Didn’t somebody say that the masks are used in connection with their “tribal” ceremonies? For others, African art is exemplified by sculptures or “fetishes” immersed in an accumulation of indeterminate liquid substances. Sometimes the sculptures are adorned with additional “exotic” items, or festooned in colorful materials such as beads, shells, appliqué, raffia, and feathers. African art, for this group, is the art that exists in Africa.

Review of Contemporary Art in Africa :   by Andre Magnin and Jacques Soulillou

      Contemporary Art in Africa features sixty contemporary artists, (I counted sixty-three names), only three of whom are female, all of them from sub-Saharan Africa. A brief, one-page "Preface" is folloewd by an "Introduction," allowing Magnin and Soulillou, the co-authors and editors, to take us on an intellectual rendezvous in which the vision and idea that gave birth to the book are justified. This done, the editors proceed to divide the book into three segments: "Territory," "Frontier," and "World." As envisioned, these are provinces that are at once separate and interconnected. They are fluid, interchangeable and, allowing for attendant gradations, congruent. Unlike, say, the tribality theory of yore, the authors' categorizations recognize the difficulty of inelastic pigeon-holing and the dangers of uncompromising perscriptiveness.