'New Geographies' Explores Uncharted African Art

“It’s really a golden age in African art history,” says professor Suzanne Blier, who spearheaded the two-day conference “New Geographies of Contemporary African Art.” The conference, which seeks to create a dialogue about the evolving role of contemporary African art, is presented by the Committee on African Studies as a part of Harvard’s larger Africa Initiative. It will take place today and tomorrow at the Center for Government and International Studies.

Blier, who is on the faculty of the African and African American Studies Department as well as of the History of Art and Architecture Department, notes that the growing field of contemporary African art has been received with a newfound openness in the West. Collectors, museums, and scholars are demonstrating increasing interest in the burgeoning field.

“For a long time, whenever anyone thought about African art, [they thought,] ‘Well, if it is not traditional then in some way it’s not worthy of serious engagement,’ because, quite falsely, it was claimed that whatever was being created was derivative of modern art in the West,” Blier says. As opposed to the West influencing African art, Blier emphasizes, African art has had an influence on the West. Pablo Picasso, whose cubist work in particular illustrates the artist’s African inspirations, is just one prominent example.

This historical disinterest is manifested in the lack of African art on Harvard’s own campus. It currently enjoys only a scattered presence, featured on a small scale in buildings such as the DuBois Center. Though the Fogg and the Peabody art museums have large collections of African art, they have remained in storage. However, the construction of a new art museum in Allston could remedy the deficit in exhibition space devoted to the discipline.

“It’s such a timely occasion in which to address this [African art],” Blier says. “There are real issues on campus about the new museum, where it’s going to be placed, and is there going to be means to get African art on ongoing view in the museum with a curator.”

The theme of the conference, “New Geographies,” refers to the new place and shifting identity of contemporary African art and its artists as interest grows both at Harvard and in the global art market. “Contemporary African artists sometimes will dispute the very nature of that set of descriptive terms,” Blier says. “Some of them were born in Africa and grew up in the West. Others grew up in the West and have parents in Africa. Some of them wish not to be considered as African artists because they consider themselves to be artists first and foremost, and that by putting an adjective to their work, for some, it’s seen to be diminishing to the ways in which they want to engage with art more generally.”

“Many of the shifts that are occurring are spatial, and in that sense they concern geography,” says Gary van Wyk, one of the conference’s featured speakers and a co-curator of Axis, a contemporary African art museum in Chelsea, New York. “Similarly, in attempting to grapple with them we are involved in processes that are analogous to cartography.”

Van Wyk attributes the recent receptivity of contemporary African art to globalization, which he argues has the potential to both help and hurt the contemporary African art scene. “Globalization is both the enabler and the digester,” he says. “It both enables the incorporation, but as it incorporates it digests and dissolves. So it’s like kind of a black hole that sucks everything in and crushes it into nothingness. One must question if one’s acceptance is really the sign of one’s disappearance.”

The noticeable absence of many African-based artists and scholars due to financial difficulties is just one illustration of the challenges still remaining. “There are all kinds of extra difficulties that I think people based in Africa have to face that limit their access to bigger scenes,” says Gemma Rodriguez, one of the conference’s graduate student organizers.

With many difficulties still facing the African community, much of its contemporary art has a social and political message. Blier cites the environment—in particular the destruction of places like the Delta area of Nigeria—as an example of such an issue. “Artists are not just concerned with the creation of visually profound works of art, but with addressing salient issues that are important for them and for their communities,” she says. Blier emphasizes a desire in the artists to explore and think through the major changes facing the new generation in this era of post-independence and globalization.

Although the conference’s focus is contemporary African art, van Wyk believes the issue of new geographies is applicable to everyone. “We are all caught up in this,” he says.