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.
Estonian artist Sirje Runge’s (born 1950) visionary 1975 thesis project conceptualizes the dynamics between the needs of the individual and the overall logic and construction of the city space in late Soviet Estonia.
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.
Widely distributed in recent years and now in MoMA’s collection, the two-minute video depicts Parente entering a closet and hanging up her sweater without first removing it from her body.
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.
This essay considers the photographic work of Sanlé Sory and Ambroise Ngaimoko as part of the flourishing music, cinema, and art scenes in Burkina Faso and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where studio photography was a part of the creative expression and self-styling of these nascent republics.
Beginning with the Autocurriculum, this essay examines Claudio Perna’s conceptual fixation on the fluid boundaries between documentation, artistic expression, and self-representation.
James Barnor (b.1929) is a pioneering figure in Ghanaian photography. He documented the decolonizing processes and realities of the postcolonial context in Ghana, as well as the diasporic, metropolitan life in London.
This source is an English translation by Stephanie M. Hohlios of a compelling 1971 memoir-essay by Japanese artist Okamoto Tarō—“Watashi to jinruigaku: pari daigaku minzoku gakka no koro (Anthropology and I: My Time at the University of Paris Department of Ethnology)”. Okamoto’s essay “Anthropology and I” sheds light on a widely recognized but little understood…
The session explores New York as a site of intersections of artists from around the world who have passed through or settled in the city.
Composed of multiple bodies and body parts, human and animal, Cecilia Vicuña’s Pantera Negra y Yo (Black Panther and Me) doubles a painting that was destroyed and then recreated from memory. It is intimately connected with text, hinting at close connections between past, present, and future.
