African Art Events Global Round-Up - August 6th, 2015.
A hand-picked listing of African and Afro-Diasporan art events happening around the world, updated weekly.
“Elsewhere” at Art21 Lagos.
Featuring eight artists from parts of Africa, with others based in the diaspora or hailing from other parts of the world, ‘Elsewhere’ is a contemporary multi-medium exhibition that looks at how notions of fantasy, through history, memory and the creation of new images, can be interconnected in a global environment. The artists in this exhibition define alternative ways of depicting otherness, not rooted in spatial boundaries but by instability, fluidity and cross-cultural assimilation.
Artists featured: Joseph Eze (Nigeria), Namsa Leuba (Switzerland), Vincent Michea (France), Abraham Oghobase (Nigeria), Demola Ogunajo (Nigeria), Paa Joe and Jacob Tetteh-Ashong (Ghana), Yarisal and Kublitz (Switzerland/Denmark).
Dates: 29 June - 10 September 2015.
Where: Eko Hotel and Suites, Victoria Island, Lagos.
“Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Verses After Dusk” at the Serpentine Gallery, London.
Grounded in ambiguity, Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings occupy no specific position in space and time yet still manage to raise timeless questions concerning the representation of black subjects in art history. Far from generic in their depictions. her figures, whether individuals or groups of people, not only show Yiadom-Boakye’s unique style of painting, but also invites the viewer to consider the subjects as suggestions rather than explicit narratives or specific portraits. Her current exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery is a survey of recent work presenting a comprehensive range of painterly techniques, representing the artist’s key series of works.
Dates: 2 June - 13 September 2015
Where: Serpentine Gallery.
“From Within and Without: The History of Haitian Photography” at the NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale.
Consisting of almost 350 works from the late 19th century to the present, the exhibition engages and familiarizes the viewer with the history of photography in Haiti through the work of contemporary artists and photographers, offering a unique perspective on life in Haiti and how political and natural crises have been perceived by native and foreign photographers and photojournalists. From Within and Without is organized by NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale and is curated by Haitian-American artist Edouard Duval-Carrié.
Dates: 21 June - 4 October 2015
Where: NSU Art Museum.
“David Adjaye Selects” at Cooper Hewitt.
Ghanaian architect David Adjaye presents a series of curated textiles from West and Central Africa, all textiles from the museum’s permanent collection, in the latest installment of the Selects series. The exhibition is the 12th in the ongoing series, in which prominent designers, artists and architects are invited to mine and interpret the museum’s collection.
Dates: 19 June – 14 February 2016
Where: Cooper Hewitt
“Beauté Congo – 1926-2015 – Congo Kitoko” at Foundation Cartier Pour L’Art Contemporain, Paris.
With an emphasis on the rich cultural heritage of contemporary popular culture painting in the Democratic Republic of Congo from the 1920s onward, and also including other creative expressions such as music, photography, comics, sculpture and other mediums, this exhibition - which includes 350 works from 41 Congolese artists - seeks to highlight the country’s extraordinary cultural vitality.
Dates: 11 July - 15 November 2015
Where: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain
“Home Affairs” at the NOW Gallery, London.
Furniture designer, Yinka Ilori, fashion designer Christine Mhando of Chichia London and creative consultant Arieta Mujay devise theatrical, visually compelling conceptual spaces, brought to life with curated film, archival footage and performance.
Dates: 20 August – 4 September 2015
Where: NOW Gallery.
“Chris Ofili: Night and Day” at the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen.
The first solo museum survey of British-Nigerian artist Chris Ofili’s work in the US, the exhibition encompasses five galleries over three levels of the Aspen Art Museum, showcasing his paintings, drawings, and a selection of sculptures.
Dates: 17 July - 1 November 2015
Where: Aspen Art Museum.
“Myths Recreated” at Worldart Gallery, Cape Town.
This group exhibition aims to celebrate African myths and storytelling. The myths chosen deal with universal themes such as the origin of the world and the fate of the individual after death. We selected 7 artists and briefed them to recreate 2 stories that we selected as artworks.
The artists showing works are:
Fuzzy Slippers
Nolan Dennis
Thandiwe Tshabalala
Darren Christian
Russell Abrahams
Karabo Makenna (Art of Brother)
Cobus Engelbrecht (Art of Brother)
Dates: 31 July - 5 August
Where: Worldart Gallery.
“Black Chronicles III: Fifth Pan-African Congress” at Rivington Place, London.
Marking the 70th anniversary of the Fifth Pan-African Congress, this new exhibition features photographs by John Deakin on display for the first time.
The Fifth Pan-African Congress took place in Manchester in October 1945, five months after the Second World War had ended. Following their participation in the War, European powers were forced to liberate hundreds of millions of Africans living under colonial rule, and pass radical measures condemning imperialism, racial discrimination and capitalism, all of which informed this historic meeting.
Dates: 16 July - 12 September 2015
Where: Rivington Place.
“The Rise of Sneaker Culture” at the Brooklyn Museum, New York.
Consisting of approximately 150 pairs of sneakers, the exhibition takes a look at the evolution of the sneaker - from its beginnings as an athletic development, to its current role as status symbol.
Dates: 10 July - 4 October 2015
Where: Brooklyn Museum.
“Zanele Muholi: Isibonelo/Evidence” at the Brooklyn Museum.
Consisting of a total of 87 works, created between 2007 and 2014, Zanele Muholi: Isibonelo/Evidence is the most comprehensive museum presentation to date of Muholi’s works.
Centering on documenting the experiences of marginalized lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) communities, both in South Africa and abroad, artist and activist Muholi combines photography, video, and installation to create a platform for agency and visibility for individuals that are a part of these groups. Most notably, and at times injecting herself in her work, Muholi places the majority of her focus on members of the black lesbian and transgender communities of South Africa. The result is often an intimate but highly important series of works that speak to experiences otherwise hidden in plain sight.
Dates: 1 May - 1 November 2015
Where: Brooklyn Museum.
Kara Walker: “African Boy Attendant Curio (Bananas)” at the Brooklyn Museum.
Kara Walker: “African Boy Attendant Curio (Bananas)” presents a new resin-cast version of one of the sculptures that accompanied A Subtlety, Walker’s 2014 project at the Domino Sugar Refinery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Dates: 20 May - 18 October 2015
Where: Brooklyn Museum.
“Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks” at the Brooklyn Museum.
The first major exhibition of the artist’s notebooks, Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks which features 160 pages of these rarely seen documents, along with related works on paper and large-scale paintings.
Dates: 3 April - 23 August 2015
Where: Brooklyn Museum.
“Whitfield Lovell: Deep River” at the Cummer Museum, Jacksonville.
MacArthur Fellowship winner and internationally-recognized artist, Whitfield Lovell’s multi-media installation explores ideas of memory, identity, and freedom, taking inspiration from the legacy of African Americans who fled from slavery, crossing the Tennessee River to freedom during the Civil War, using sculpture, video, drawing, sound, and music to create a unique experience that takes visitors on a symbolic journey in search of independence.
Dates: 20 May - 13 September 2015
Where: Cummer Museum.
El Anatsui “Five Decades” at the Jack Shainman: The School Gallery, Kinderhook.
To mark the first anniversary of The School, a once middle and elementary school turned large art venue, and El Anatsui’s recent Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement Award at the Venice Biennale this year, a vast timeline of the Ghanaian sculptor’s larger-than-life artwork is dynamically displayed throughout the 30,000 square-foot space in the town of Kinderhook.
Spanning Anatsui’s work beginning in the late 1970s when Anatsui began his tenure as a professor of art at the University of Nsukka, Nigeria, Five Decades is a comprehensive survey spanning the last fifty years of Anatsui’s celebrated career, from compositions in painting, wood, and clay, to the magnificent metal works for which he is renowned. More than 40 pieces of his work are on display at the gallery’s upstate space.
Dates: 17 May - 26 September 2015
Where: Jack Shainman: The School Gallery.
“Nick Cave: Here Hear” at the Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills.
A collection of approximately thirty sculptural Soundsuits in the main gallery arranged in a dynamic vignette, a room of seven newly commissioned artworks surrounded by a new site-specific wall-based tapestry inspired by Cave’s childhood watching the night sky, an additional gallery with a selection of his recent sculpture work and a separate area with the artist’s video work, Here Hear is a definitive exhibition of multi-disciplinary artist Nick Cave’s life’s work.
Dates: 20 June - 11 October 2015
Where: Cranbrook Art Museum.
“Edge of Silence” at the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town.
Edge of Silence is a group show featuring artwork by some of Goodman Gallery’s leading contemporary artists:
Broomberg & Chanarin / Carla Busuttil / Nolan Oswald Dennis / mounir fatmi / Kendell Geers / David Goldblatt / Haroon Gunn-Salie / Alfredo Jaar / William Kentridge / Kapwani Kiwanga / Liza Lou / Gerald Machona / Lorna Simpson / Hank Willis Thomas / Jeremy Wafer.
Dates: 23 July – 29 August 2015
Where: Goodman Gallery.
Emmanuel Iduma and Emeka Okereke in Residence at L’appartement 22, Rabat.
Curated by Abdellah Karroum, this experimental collaboration between writer Emmanuel Iduma and photogrpaher Emeka Okereke will see the two question the difficult relations between the borders of Rabat, Tangier and Melilla by meeting and sharing daily life and experiences of migrants. As Emeka Okereke could not secure his visa, the residency is established between Morocco and Nigeria. The photographer and the writer will be working remotely on a series of collaborative works that interrogate issues of migration and exile.
Dates: 14 July - 31 August, 2015
Where: L’appartement 22.
“Guess Who’s coming to Dinner?” at the Richard Tattinger Gallery, New York.
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? celebrates the growing impact of African art on the global stage and serves as a crucial platform for visibility in New York. The exhibition introduces the work of twelve African artists: Halida Boughriet, Gopal Dagnogo, Sam Hopkins, Onyeka Ibe, Amina Menia, Chika Modum, Aida Muluneh, Chike Obeagu, Amalia Ramanankirahina, Ephrem Solomon, Uche Uzorka, and Beatrice Wanjiku.
Dates: 16 July - 22 August, 2015
Where: Richard Tattinger Gallery.
“Arresting Patterns” at Artspace, New Haven.
This exhibition brings together a group of artists who seek to uncover the often-overlooked patterns of racial disparity in the United States Criminal Justice system. The urgent need to explore indicators of intentional and unintentional discrimination arises in the aftermath of the Ferguson verdict, the Baltimore riots, the killing of Eric Garner, and the killing of William K. Scott. These events have produced collective frustration around the question of whether every citizen is protected equally under the law, and have led to a call for a more transparent dialogue between citizens, law enforcement, and policy makers.
Dates: 17 July – 13 September, 2015
Where: Artspace.
“Zina Saro-Wiwa: Did You Know We Taught Them How to Dance?” at Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston, TX.
Centered on the relationship between the people of the Niger-Delta and their surrounding environment, largely tarnished by neglect from the Nigerian government and pollution from oil companies, Nigerian-British filmmaker and artist Zina Saro-Wiwa’s first solo exhibition at the Blaffer Art Musuem includes a series of video installations, photographs, and a sound installation produced in the Niger Delta region of southeastern Nigeria from 2013 to 2015 that cultivate strategies of psychic survival and performance, underscoring the complex and expressive ways in which people live in an area historically fraught with the politics of energy, labor and land. The exhibition uses folklore, masquerade traditions, religious practices, food and Nigerian popular aesthetics to test art’s capacity to transform and to envision new concepts of environment and environmentalism.
Dates: 26 September – 19 December 2015
Where: Blaffer Art Museum.
“Syd Shelton: Rock Against Racism” at Rivington Place, London.
Between 1976 and 1981, the movement Rock Against Racism (RAR) confronted the growing racist ideologies in streets, parks and town halls all over Britain. Formed by a collective of concerned and affected musicians and political activists to fight fascism and racism through music, we revisit this pivotal time and radical period in post war British history and 20th century race relations through the first major exhibition of Syd Shelton’s photographs.
Dates: 2 October – 5 December 2015
Where: Rivington Place.
“Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955-1989)” at the Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery, Syracuse.
View a retrospective of the British-Nigerian artist’s work throughout his short by highly impactful lifetime.
Dates: 18 August – 22 October 2015
Where: Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery.
“Standard Bank Young Artist Award Exhibition 2015: Kemang Wa Lehulere, History Will Break Your Heart” at The Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum, Port Elizabeth.
In History will break your heart, Kemang Wa Lehulere’s award-winning exhibition looks at the artist’s current exploration of marginalized South African artists. In it, he creates a dialogue between his own work and the work of veteran fine artists Ernest Mancoba, Gladys Mgudlandlu and writer Rolfes Robert Reginald Dhlomo, using various mediums to tell the stories of these three artists, highlighting the importance of their contribution to art and writing in South Africa.
Dates: 28 July - 2 September
Where: The Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum.
“Florine Demosthene: The Capture” at Gallery MOMO, Johannesburg.
Haitian artist Florine Demosthene’s exhibit sets about to recreate society’s views and understanding of the black female body, depicting herself in various narratives and allegories.
Dates: 6 August - 4 September 2015
Where: Gallery MOMO.
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