Festac ́77: 2nd World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture


Book Description

Early in 1977, thousands of artists, writers, musicians, activists, and scholars from Africa and the Black diaspora assembled in Lagos for FESTAC '77, 11 years after the First World Festival of Negro Arts. This is the first publication to consider FESTAC in all its cultural-historic complexity, addressing the planetary scale of the event alongside the personal and artistic encounters it made possible.




The Pan-African Nation


Book Description

When Nigeria hosted the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in 1977, it celebrated a global vision of black nationhood and citizenship animated by the exuberance of its recent oil boom. Andrew Apter's The Pan-African Nation tells the full story of this cultural extravaganza, from Nigeria's spectacular rebirth as a rapidly developing petro-state to its dramatic demise when the boom went bust. According to Apter, FESTAC expanded the horizons of blackness in Nigeria to mirror the global circuits of its economy. By showcasing masks, dances, images, and souvenirs from its many diverse ethnic groups, Nigeria forged a new national culture. In the grandeur of this oil-fed confidence, the nation subsumed all black and African cultures within its empire of cultural signs and erased its colonial legacies from collective memory. As the oil economy collapsed, however, cultural signs became unstable, contributing to rampant violence and dissimulation. The Pan-African Nation unpacks FESTAC as a historically situated mirror of production in Nigeria. More broadly, it points towards a critique of the political economy of the sign in postcolonial Africa.




FESTAC 77


Book Description




The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966


Book Description

In April 1966, thousands of artists, musicians, performers and writers from across Africa and its diaspora gathered in the Senegalese capital, Dakar, to take part in the First World Festival of Negro Arts (Premier Festival Mondial des arts nègres). The international forum provided by the Dakar Festival showcased a wide array of arts and was attended by such celebrated luminaries as Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker, Aimé Césaire, André Malraux and Wole Soyinka. Described by Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor, as 'the elaboration of a new humanism which this time will include all of humanity on the whole of our planet earth', the festival constituted a highly symbolic moment in the era of decolonization and the push for civil rights for black people in the United States. In essence, the festival sought to perform an emerging Pan-African culture, that is, to give concrete cultural expression to the ties that would bind the newly liberated African 'homeland' to black people in the diaspora. This volume is the first sustained attempt to provide not only an overview of the festival itself but also of its multiple legacies, which will help us better to understand the 'festivalization' of Africa that has occurred in recent decades with most African countries now hosting a number of festivals as part of a national tourism and cultural development strategy.




Noah Davis


Book Description

Providing a crucial record of the painter Noah Davis’s extraordinary oeuvre, this monograph tells the story of a brilliant artist and cultural force through the eyes of his friends and collaborators. Despite his exceedingly premature death at the age of 32, Davis’s paintings have deeply influenced the rise of figurative and representational painting in the twenty-first century. Davis’s emotionally charged work places him firmly in the canon of great American painting. Stirring, elusive, and attuned to the history of painting, his compositions infuse scenes from everyday life with a magical realist atmosphere and contain traces of his abiding interest in artists such as Marlene Dumas, Kerry James Marshall, Fairfield Porter, and Luc Tuymans. This catalogue is born of the unique relationship between Davis and Helen Molesworth, whom Davis entrusted to be the curator of his work. It is published on the occasion of the 2020 exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, which travels to The Underground Museum in Los Angeles, a space that Davis founded with his wife, artist Karon Davis. In her introduction, catalogue essay, and interviews with important figures in Davis’s life, Molesworth shows how the artist’s generosity and sense of responsibility galvanized a uniquely supportive artistic community, culture, and vision. Together with color illustrations and archival photographs, the book features heartfelt testimonials that unfold in the intimate yet expansive spirit of studio visits with people close to him.




The Trial of Dedan Kimathi


Book Description

Kenyan-born novelist and playwright Ngugi wa Thiong’o and his collaborator, Micere Githae Mugo, have built a powerful and challenging play out of the circumstances surrounding the 1956 trial of Dedan Kimathi, the celebrated Kenyan hero who led the Mau Mau rebellion against the British colonial regime in Kenya and was eventually hanged. A highly controversial character, Kimathi’s life has been subject to intense propaganda by both the British government, who saw him as a vicious terrorist, and Kenyan nationalists, who viewed him as a man of great courage and commitment. Writing in the 1970s, the playwrights’ response to colonialist writings about the Mau Mau movement in The Trial of Dedan Kimathi is to sing the praises of the deeds of this hero of the resistance who refused to surrender to British imperialism. It is not a reproduction of the farcical “trial” at Nyeri. Rather, according to the preface, it is “an imaginative recreation and interpretation of the collective will of the Kenyan peasants and workers in their refusal to break under sixty years of colonial torture and ruthless oppression by the British ruling classes and their continued determination to resist exploitation,oppression and new forms of enslavement.”




Art and Its Worlds: Exhibitions, Institutions and Art Becoming Public Exhibition Histories Vol. 12


Book Description

An anthology of essays on art's relation to the public realm since 1989 This critical anthology explores the myriad histories and worlds through which art is produced and experienced. It is guided by the following questions: How are the "global" and the "located" shaped and understood in disparate contexts and times? How have artists experimented with modes of exhibition-making and public presentation? Key essays previously published by Afterall are included alongside new image-led presentations, translated material and commissioned texts. The anthology addresses the topic in both theoretical terms and through case studies. Contributors include: Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Miguel A. López, Eddie Chambers, Francesca Recchia, Pablo Lafuente, Philippe Pirotte, Ntone Edjabe, Clémentine Deliss, Khwezi Gule, Charles Gaines, David Teh, Ekaterina Degot, Ana Teixeira Pinto, María Berríos, Mujeres Creando, Comunitario del Valle de Xico, Tonika Sealy Thompson and Stefano Harney.




African Theatre


Book Description

The contributions to this volume in the African Theatre series make clear that the role of women in the theatre across the continent has changed as control is mainly held by literate elites and women's traditional standing has been lost to men.




Congo Art Works


Book Description

-Showcases paintings by innovative Congolese artists from Lubumbashi, Kinshasa, Bunia, Mbandaka, Kikwit and Kisangani -Explores the concept of painting as visual memory Painting was one of the defining factors in the formation of Congolese national culture during the seventies and eighties. Looking back on works from this era, we gain a clear impression of the country's collective memory. The exhibition of paintings featured in this book explores the development of Congolese society from 1968-2012. Portraits, landscapes and allegorical paintings alternate with urban scenes, historical figures and critical reflections on religion, politics and social problems. Humor is never far away. Historical objects, photos, drawings and archive footage provide a broader perspective, and similarities to older art forms and other genres from Congo are clearly visible. The importance of popular paintings is not fundamentally different from that of more traditionally respected art; both are crucial reflections on their contexts, and informed the development of Congolese society.




Afro-Atlantic Histories


Book Description

A colossal, panoramic, much-needed appraisal of the visual cultures of Afro-Atlantic territories across six centuries Afro-Atlantic Histories brings together a selection of more than 400 works and documents by more than 200 artists from the 16th to the 21st centuries that express and analyze the ebbs and flows between Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe. The book is motivated by the desire and need to draw parallels, frictions and dialogues around the visual cultures of Afro-Atlantic territories--their experiences, creations, worshiping and philosophy. The so-called Black Atlantic, to use the term coined by Paul Gilroy, is geography lacking precise borders, a fluid field where African experiences invade and occupy other nations, territories and cultures. The plural and polyphonic quality of "histórias" is also of note; unlike the English "histories," the word in Portuguese carries a double meaning that encompasses both fiction and nonfiction, personal, political, economic and cultural, as well as mythological narratives. The book features more than 400 works from Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean, as well as Europe, from the 16th to the 21st century. These are organized in eight thematic groupings: Maps and Margins; Emancipations; Everyday Lives; Rites and Rhythms; Routes and Trances; Portraits; Afro Atlantic Modernisms; Resistances and Activism. Artists include: Nina Chanel Abney, Emma Amos, Benny Andrews, Emanoel Araujo, Maria Auxiliadora, Romare Bearden, John Biggers, Paul Cézanne, Victoria Santa Cruz, Beauford Delaney, Aaron Douglas, Melvin Edwards, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Ben Enwonwu, Ellen Gallagher, Theodore Géricault, Barkley Hendricks, William Henry Jones, Loïs Mailou Jones, Titus Kaphar, Wifredo Lam, Norman Lewis, Ibrahim Mahama, Edna Manley, Archibald Motley, Abdias Nascimento, Gilberto de la Nuez, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Dalton Paula, Rosana Paulino, Howardena Pindell, Heitor dos Prazeres, Joshua Reynolds, Faith Ringgold, Gerard Sekoto, Alma Thomas, Hank Willis Thomas, Rubem Valentim, Kara Walker and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.