Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art was a travelling exhibition and accompanying exhibition catalogue devoted to twentieth-century artistic production in sub-Saharan Africa. Curated by Susan Vogel for the Center for African Art in New York, it opened in 1991 at the Center for African Art and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. The New York presentation comprised about 133 works from 15 African countries. Vogel divided the material into five curatorial categories: Traditional Art, New Functional Art, Urban Art, International Art, and Extinct Art. The last category was identified in later touring materials as Past in the Present.
After opening in New York in May 1991, the exhibition travelled to the University Art Museum in Berkeley, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Center for the Fine Arts in Miami. The Center for African Art and Prestel published a 296-page catalogue edited by Vogel with assistance from Ima Ebong. Its contributors were Walter van Beek, Donald John Cosentino, Bogumil Jewsiewicki, Thomas McEvilley, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Ebong.
The exhibition included works by academically trained artists, self-taught urban painters, photographers, sculptors, coffin makers, sign painters, ceramicists, and producers of ritual and functional objects. The artists represented included Sunday Jack Akpan, Kane Kwei, Chéri Samba, Tshibumba Kanda-Matulu, Moké, Sokari Douglas Camp, Magdalena Odundo, Ouattara Watts, Trigo Piula, Iba N'Diaye, Malangatana Valente Ngwenya, and Kivuthi Mbuno. Contemporary reviews and later assessments addressed the exhibition's scope and curatorial approach, including its classification of the works and the presentation of objects across different institutional settings.
Background
Susan Vogel established the Center for African Art in 1984 and was serving as its executive director when she developed Africa Explores. John Picton observed that the Center had produced twelve exhibitions with related publications by 1991, a record he considered unmatched at the time by any other museum specialising in African art. In his account, some earlier Center exhibitions followed established approaches to African art scholarship, whereas later projects examined subjects such as distinctions between art and artefact, portraiture in African visual traditions, and sixteenth-century interactions between Africa and Europe. Picton distinguished Africa Explores from those projects because it surveyed a broad range of visual production in contemporary Africa rather than concentrating primarily on sculpture derived from pre-colonial traditions.
Michael Brenson of The New York Times described the exhibition as a pioneering presentation across two museums and identified Vogel as its organiser. He also associated it with the Center's practice of inviting personal responses from visitors while encouraging them to examine their assumptions about African art. According to Brenson, both the institution and the exhibition concentrated on sub-Saharan Africa. Picton cautioned that discussions of African art often treated Africa as a unified category, although the continent's varied regions and histories made the term "African art" difficult to apply without qualification. He further argued that defining African art history primarily through local sub-Saharan traditions excluded ancient Egypt, classical North Africa, Berber and Arab cultures in the north, the Christian arts of Egypt, Nubia, and Ethiopia, and twentieth-century developments elsewhere on the continent.
Africa Explores followed several late twentieth-century exhibitions that had introduced contemporary African and other non-Western artists into European and American institutions. Brenson situated it after the 1989 Paris exhibition Magiciens de la terre, which presented contemporary art from several regions, and the Studio Museum in Harlem's 1990 exhibition Contemporary African Artists: Changing Tradition, featuring nine painters and sculptors from six countries. Kay Larson similarly discussed Africa Explores in relation to those exhibitions, describing Magiciens de la terre as a search for artists in geographically distant settings and the Studio Museum exhibition as a presentation of nine Africans already participating in the international art world. Brenson mentioned that Sunday Jack Akpan, Kane Kwei, and Chéri Samba had also been included in Magiciens de la terre, but considered their work easier to interpret within the framework of Africa Explores.
During the Miami presentation, Vogel said that preparation had involved two years of viewing art and speaking with artists. According to an article in Christian Science Monitor, she intended to provide greater context for little-known contemporary African works and to present art as an active component of African social life. The article stated that the exhibition challenged two common ideas about twentieth-century Africa: that traditional African art represented a culture that had ceased to exist and that modern African art merely imitated Western models. A preview of the Carnegie Museum of Art presentation repeated those propositions and identified Vogel as both curator and executive director of the Center for African Art, from which the travelling exhibition originated. Deborah P. Work of Sun Sentinel reported that the exhibition also challenged the tendency to reduce African art to masks, carvings, and ceremonial objects. She cited Center for the Fine Arts curator Lynn Anderson's observation that African art, like art in other societies, had continued to change.
Organisation and venues
The exhibition opened simultaneously at the Center for African Art and the New Museum of Contemporary Art on 16 May 1991. Writing in African Arts, Jack Flam gave the Center's dates as 16 May to 31 December 1991 and the New Museum's dates as 16 May to 18 August 1991. Larson likewise reported 18 August as the New Museum's closing date and 31 December as the Center for African Art's. The Christian Science Monitor, however, stated that the New Museum display continued until 11 August and the Center's until 31 December. Wahlman listed the Center for African Art presentation as remaining open through 5 January 1992, before the exhibition began its national tour.
According to Flam, the 133 objects shown in New York were distributed in approximately equal numbers between the two museums. He considered this division consistent with the exhibition's examination of connections between modern and traditional African art, because comparable objects were displayed in both a contemporary-art institution and a museum associated primarily with traditional African material. Brenson viewed the two installations as reflections of one another rather than simply complementary displays. He mentioned that each opened with Sunday Jack Akpan's realistic commemorative sculptures from Nigeria and Ghanaian artist Kane Kwei's coffins shaped as a plant, hen, onion, and Mercedes-Benz. Flam also identified Kwei's coffins as some of the first objects encountered at both New York locations.
Displaying related kinds of objects in the two institutions affected how some of them were perceived. Flam contrasted the Center for African Art's townhouse, which he described as refined and contemplative, with the New Museum's loft-like galleries, whose atmosphere he considered more active and noisy. In his account, Kwei's onion and Mercedes-Benz coffins acquired what he described as an almost classical and metaphorical character at the Center, whereas the cocoa-pod, Pan Am-clipper, and hen coffins evoked Pop art at the New Museum. He similarly found that factory-made plastic dolls used as Yoruba substitutes appeared witty and sophisticated at the New Museum but coarse in the Center's setting. Larson considered the Center's small, dim, and warm townhouse an unusual environment for contemporary African art, while the New Museum's larger and less visually prescriptive galleries allowed the individual works greater independence. Brenson reached a different conclusion, finding the Center installation more intelligible because its smaller rooms helped define the curatorial categories. In his view, the New Museum weakened distinctions among the works by devoting its largest space to art compatible with established Western galleries and museums.
After the New York presentation ended, the part shown at the New Museum was scheduled to appear at the University Art Museum in Berkeley, California, from 2 October to 29 December 1991. Wahlman likewise reported that the New Museum selection would remain in Berkeley until 29 December before rejoining the other part of the exhibition. Flam stated that the New Museum objects reached the University Art Museum in October 1991 and that the two sections were subsequently reunited for the national tour. Wahlman's itinerary placed the reunited exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art from 9 February to 5 April 1992; the Saint Louis Art Museum from 15 May to 5 July 1992; the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte from 8 August to 11 October 1992; the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh from 7 November 1992 to 10 January 1993; and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., from 6 February to 4 April 1993. The Christian Science Monitor published the same sequence and dates, naming the Charlotte institution as the Mint Museum of Charlotte, North Carolina.
The Carnegie Museum of Art displayed the exhibition from 7 November 1992 until 10 January 1993. A preview in the New Pittsburgh Courier reported that this presentation contained about 130 objects, most of them lent by private collections in several countries. At the St. Louis Art Museum, the exhibition continued through 5 July 1992. Its final Miami presentation remained at the Center for the Fine Arts through 18 July 1993. Work stated that this installation contained more than 70 paintings, ceramics, photographs, and sculptures by contemporary artists.
Funding and public programming
Duffy identified the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Forbes Foundation, the Aaron Diamond Foundation, the Anne S. Richardson Fund, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts as financial supporters of the exhibition. He added that Anheuser-Busch Companies partly funded the Saint Louis presentation. Flam reported that the Center for African Art organised a symposium on 19 and 20 October 1991. During the two-day event, African artists and critics considered whether contemporary African art involved circumstances not fully understood by Western audiences and discussed their interest in participating in the international art world. Public events associated with the Miami exhibition included an African Cultural Arts Family Festival; Robert Farris Thompson's lecture, "Face of the Gods: The Black Atlantic Visual Tradition", on 19 June; tours titled "Exploring Africa in South Florida", conducted on 1 and 8 July by the Kuumba Artists Association of Florida; and family workshops in which children viewed masks in the exhibition before making masks and headdresses.
Catalogue