Nka Roundtable III: “Contemporary African Art and the Museum”

Chika Okeke convenes another virtual roundtable at the Nka blog.

Nka Roundtable III: “Contemporary African Art and the Museum”

Over the next several weeks curators and directors of major museums in the United States, Germany, Japan, South Africa and the UK will engage in spirited but substantial discussion on the relationship between contemporary African art and the museum. I expect excursions into the history of this relationship, its crucial moments, state of affairs, and challenges that remain. In the process, we shall debate issues of presenting this material in art and ethnology museums; the politics of acquisitions and display; museums and scholarship; and the place of contemporary African art–relative to the “traditional” and western contemporary. I suspect that there will be surprising turns in the course of our discussion, but I am certain that the deliberations of this diverse, unprecedented and distinguished panel of curators will surely be of immense value to students and scholars working or interested in this exciting, dynamic field. Please join us!

Convener: Chika Okeke-Agulu (Princeton University)

Participants: Marla Berns (Director, Fowler Museum of Cultural History, University of California, Los Angeles), Christa Clarke (Senior Curator, Newark Museum, Newark, NJ), Laurie Ann Farrell (Director of Exhibitions, Savannah College of Art & Design Gallery, Savannah, GA), Khwezi Gule (Chief Curator, Hector Pieterson Memorial, Johannesburg), Kinsey Katchka (independent scholar/curator), Yukiya Kawaguchi (Associate Professor/Curator, National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka), Clive Kellner (Curator-at-Large, The Gordon Schachat Collection, Johannesburg), Karen Milbourne (Curator, Smithsonian National Museum for African Art, Washington DC), Raison Naidoo (Director Arts Collections, Iziko: South African National Gallery, Cape Town), Enid Schildkrout (Chief Curator/Director of Exhibitions, Museum for African Art, New York) Chris Spring (Curator, British Museum, London), Ulf Vierke (Director, Iwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth), Okwui Enwezor, Salah M. Hassan.

Surely, once again, worth following closely … Find it here.

On a different note, have you followed Nka’s Roundtable Conversations at the Duke UP’s blog? I have read through the latest responses and commentaries over a cup of breakfast tea and really loved this line by Okwui Enwezor (my emphasis)

… All these issues make the important point raised by John [Picton] on the idea of modernity as a conduit through which all manner of artistic inventions have flowed in many directions, benefiting not only European artists (there is such a species, no?) but African, Asian, American artists as well. …

The other week (don’t ask me about the concrete context) they’ve once again been speaking about Africa as a country on the news, on Monday I was asked to characterise African art in its entirety (considering the source, I suspect that question was meant to be a challenge to the art historian in me) … - Now the question: When was the last time you heard somebody in the news talk about Europe (the continent of that name, not the EU) as if it was one country? (Pls., don’t expect me here to seriously consider the tactic oversimplification of the ideological tattle of ‘the West’ against ‘the rest!’) And, when was the last time somebody asked you to sum up European art? That’s right, not German or French arts, Romanesque or Gothic arts but European art. Against this background, forgive me the minute of delight I derived from Enwezor’s beautiful little barb!

Nka Roundtable Discussion

Once again I’m greatly indebted to one of my Facebook friends for this and think I should share it with you: Nka and Duke UP have cooperated for a roundtable discussion of influential scholars in the field of African arts. Here’s the introduction to the current roundtable which you can follow on the Duke UP’s website:

September 02, 2009

Nka Roundtable Discussion

Welcome to this august roundtable, organized by Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. With a panel of 15 influential scholars in the field today, we will, in the next several weeks, engage crucial issues confronting the field and survey the gains, challenges, and prospects of contemporary African art within the discipline of art history. Readers are encouraged to send posts; however these will be moderated. This roundtable will be the first collaboration between with Duke University Press and Nka.

Convener:
Chika Okeke-Agulu (Princeton University)

Panelists:
Okwui Enwezor (San Francisco Art Institute), Elizabeth Harney (University of Toronto), Salah Hassan (Cornell University), dele jegede (Miami University, Ohio), Sidney Kasfir (Emory University), Dominique Malaquais (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris), Steven Nelson (UCLA), Ikem Stanley Okoye (University of Delaware), John Peffer, John Picton (Emeritus, SOAS), Peter Probst (Tufts University), Colin Richards (University of Witwatersrand), Frank Ugiomoh (University of Port Harcourt), Susan Vogel (Columbia University), Jessica Winegar (Northwestern University).

Roundtable discussion entries will be posted as they are received. Please check back to the Duke University Press Log and navigate to the Nka Roundtable category to engage in this conversation.

You can navigate through the various posts via the site’s blog archive and then let’s look forward to an interesting and challenging read!