The work of Nigerian woman artist Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu (1928–2003) offers a window into cultural representations of African men and women in postcolonial Nigeria. In what was a male-dominated art scene in the 1960s, Ugbodaga-Ngu stood out not only because of her visual production, but also because of her intellectual involvement as a faculty member…
Malika Agueznay was among the first woman modernist abstract artists in Morocco. She was a student at the Casablanca École des Beaux-Arts from 1966 to 1970, during the experimental tenure of the faculty known as the Casablanca School. Shaped by the formative experience within the school, she has also distinguished herself by the ways her research emphasizes her female identity. Throughout her career, she has elaborated on seaweed as a central motif in her abstract practice. This motif is both deliberately evocative of femininity and rooted in her own female perspective.
Gee Wesley writes about Sandra Mujinga’s Flo (2019). On view in MoMA’s Contemporary Collection Galleries from March 2023, Flo considers darkness and disappearance as a means of remaining illegible to technologies of surveillance and data capture.
Artist and author Nene Aissatou Diallo revisits Safi Faye’s 1982 portrayal of Selbé, a thirty-nine-year-old mother of eight from Fad’jal as she and her compatriots go about their daily routines, carried by song. This feature reflects on the visual portrayal of Selbé, and Faye’s use of the camera in a documentary produced as part of the series As Women See It.
Theresa Musoke (born 1944) is one of Uganda’s premier artists. Part of the earlier generation of artists trained at the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts at Makerere University, author Serubiri Moses focuses on her concept of the wild and details her intellectual rebuttal of the school’s pedagogy.
In his screen-prints of the 1970s, South African artist Gavin Jantjes sought to convey the urgency and interconnectedness of global Black liberation movements. As an art student in exile in Hamburg, Jantjes dedicated his early practice to raising awareness of the brutal injustices of the apartheid system in South Africa, engaging with anti-colonial struggles waged by African and African-Diasporic populations around the world. In this essay, art historian Allison K. Young looks at a selection of early abstracted, dynamic compositions which evidence his belief in the connection between art and resistance, and his commitment to solidarity between localized struggles across the diaspora.
The 2022 C-MAP seminar series, Transversal Orientations Part II, was held on Zoom across four panels on May 25 and 26, 2022. This text by Irmgard Emmelhainz, independent translator, writer and researcher, is the second written response to the seminar.
Sarah Lookofsky, former Associate Director of the International program at MoMA, rumintes on the presentations and conversations held on Day One of the 2022 C-MAP seminar. Lookofsky calls out the contradictions of art’s embeddedness with various ecologies, rehearsing her own writing-thinking as produced by a “dumpy dialectic.”
In her essay Slender Threads, Nancy Dantas revisits the cross-generational dialogue and transnational history evoked by Saigon-born artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s The Spectres of Ancestors Becoming, presented at RAW Material Company during the Dakar Biennial of 2022.
Historian Sumit Mandal initiates a comparison of the architecture, surrounding landscapes, and histories of two keramat, or Muslim gravesite-shrines—Habib Noh in Singapore and Tuan Guru in Cape Town.
Grace Salome Kwami (1923-2006), undoubtedly a forerunner of modern art in Ghana, was one of the first women to undertake academic training in fine art. Elsbeth Court takes a closer look at her artistic formation, key work and restitution.
Art historian Y. L. Lucy Wang analyzes the architecture and photographic record of the 1955 Bandung Conference, revealing the ways in which the event visually projected its aims of South-South solidarity by bringing new meanings to architectural forms previously charged with colonial and historical associations.
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