1960s

C-MAP Africa fellow, Nancy Dantas, reads Mozambican modernist Bertina Lopes’s anticolonial trajectory and long-distance nationalism in ‘Tribute to Amílcar Cabral’ (1973).

In 1964, Swiss-born Brazilian artist Mira Schendel (1919–1988) exposed the anatomy of a painting by stripping canvas from a stretcher. For this work, which she created that year while living in São Paulo, Schendel left only a few traces of canvas, which can still be found tangled in the tacks that originally fastened it to the wooden support.

This year’s C-MAP seminar series, Transversal Orientations, comprised four panels that took place on Zoom in June 2021. This essay reflects on Acts of Transfer and the Repertoire, the second panel in the seminar series featuring Tsitsi Ella Jaji, Laura Anderson Barbata and Lina Lapelyte.

Temptations to pronounce a politics of ecology and technology are incisively moderated in this essay on Tetsumi Kudo’s multimedia installation, presented in MoMA’s Gallery 420 through the fall, prompting a broader critical commentary on the negotiations of cultural typification and belonging in the artist’s oeuvre.

If landlessness is another condition that transforms Africans into wanderers, with nothing but their labor to sell for a pittance, then the genre of landscape painting in South Africa represents a space-time of possession and dispossession. Implicit in Gladys Mgudlandlu’s landscapes is a reminder of how the ownership of land has historically epitomized South African nationhood.

Inji Efflatoun fut une peintresse et une militante marxiste et féministe égyptienne. De juin 1959 à juillet 1963, elle fut emprisonnée par le régime nassérien en raison de son appartenance au parti communiste. Au cours de ces années, elle continua à peindre. Célébrés dès les années 1960, et aujourd’hui recherchés sur le marché de l’art, les tableaux de cette période sont souvent considérés comme les plus importants de son œuvre.

Celebrated as early as the 1960s, and highly sought-after on the art market today, Egyptian painter Inji Efflatoun’s production during her four years of incarceration by the Nasserite regime is often considered the highlight of her oeuvre.

This essay looks at The Illusionist (1977), a print by Estonian artist Jüri Arrak in MoMA’s Drawings and Prints collection, and explores the larger context of the artist’s practice.

In the 1960s, Zenta Dzividzinska was one of the few women photographers in Riga whose work was highly regarded in the local and international photo club culture. Her collection of images capturing the daily life of three generations of women living in a small house in the country, have remained largely unknown until recently.

This text brings together Marisol’s sculpture Love and Frank O’Hara’s poem “Having a Coke with You” to explore their shared investigations of the personal in a capitalistic landscape, queer eroticism, global Cold War politics, and stoppered versus flowing communication.

This text is a shortened version of a presentation made to C-MAP Africa group in October 2020 on Mozambican modernist, Malangatana Valente Ngwenya.

This conference series, organized by the Cisneros Institute, looks at the history of water management in the Americas through the interdisciplinary work of artists, theorists, historians, and local communities.