Goals

How can I learn how to relate to African-American art?

October 16, 2024

As you know, I am very interested in art, and these days I am becoming more and more involved in African-American art. This is because it fascinates me and also because I still know too little about it. For a very long time, the art world paid very little attention to it, although there is a lot of catching up going on these days, and I am kind of hitching a ride on that.

When I look at African-American art, it’s important for me to be careful and nuanced in my opinions and judgments. I especially don’t want to discriminate; after all, I come from a country that had colonies and participated in the slave trade. Also, my skin color is white, which might indicate a privileged position. In any case, there is the idea that my starting point in life would have been better. This makes it difficult for me to express my feelings and opinions about African-American art without restraint. I walk on ‘stocking feet’, so to speak.

I was reminded of this after watching Karin Junger’s documentary ‘Free space’, in which she asked ‘whether a creator’s color and gender seem to determine what you can or cannot make’. This seems to be a time, especially for artists, when your gender, colour or sexual preference has become particularly decisive. And then it is about the creators, but how should I, as a viewer, relate to this? Can I, as a white Dutchman, still ‘just’ have an opinion about African-American art? How can I be free?

‘When we see us’

I recently bought the catalogue of the exhibition ‘When we see us’. This exhibition was curated by Koyo Kouoh (Executive Director & Chief Curator of the Zeitz Museum) and Tandazani Dhlakama (Curator). Watch this video to learn more about the process.

This exhibition brought together artworks by artists who depict ‘black figuration in similar ways’. The 100-year historical context makes it clear that the conversation about the body, blackness, politics and geography has been ongoing for a long time. It shows numerous parallel aesthetics and similarities between artists from different times and places, illustrating how they created work that avoided the centrality of trauma, colonialism or whiteness. The aim was to show how narratives can shift when told on their own terms. Despite the focus on the everyday lives of black people, detached from colonial trauma, the themes of the art – everyday life, joy and celebration, tranquillity, sensuality, spirituality, triumph and emancipation – still carry a weight of protest. Despite the playful subjects, the works reflect a resilience: ‘Despite our trauma, we will not be defeated and we will seek joy’.

Has this exhibition helped to broaden my horizons?

Do I already feel freer to judge African-American art? I am aware that black communities are still struggling for recognition. That is why I am (were) inclined to see only that facet. But this exhibition is not about pain and trauma, it is about joy and everyday reality. This exhibition shows that there is more than trauma, although the celebration of everyday life is also a form of protest.

So my assumption that art by black artists would (should) always be about pain was completely wrong! This exhibition demonstrates the richness and diversity of black creativity as artists tell their own stories independent of a white, colonial lens. In short, this exhibition has challenged me to think more deeply about how history, politics and identity are intertwined with art. It is up to me to look beyond just seeing the suffering.

I have highlighted a few artists from ‘When we see us’.

Every day

Kwesi Botchway’s paintings are very colorful. His main aim is to express beauty in relation to the ‘black experience’. He emphasizes black skin with purple tones, a color associated with royalty, grandeur, mystery, magic, seduction and wisdom. Some of his subjects are inspired by real people, but others come from his imagination. His work was also shown in the exhibition ‘Africa Supernova’ at Museum De Kade in Amersfoort.

Peter Clarke He was an artist, poet and activist who produced paintings, drawings and prints depicting the everyday life and social and political struggles of marginalized communities in South Africa under “apartheid”. He also studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and the Atelier Nord in Oslo. He died in 2014.

Ben Enwonwu Until September 2024, the World Museum in Leiden is hosting the exhibition ‘In schitterend licht’ which includes works by Ben Enwonwu. The curator Azu Nwagbogu of this exhibition, Azu Nwagbogu, gives more information about Ben Enwonwu in this video. See also the website of ‘In schitterend licht’.

Ben Enwonwu is one of the most revered African artists of the 20th century. He was a pioneer of African modernism. Although widely acclaimed as a painter and sculptor, he was also a distinguished writer and art critic. His works have been included in exhibitions at prominent museums such as the Tate, the National Gallery of Lagos, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in D.C. In 1968, he was appointed cultural advisor to the newly formed Nigerian government. His reputation reached far and wide as his art was even used to support black liberation movements in Africa, Europe and the USA.

Joy and revelry

Esiri Erheriene-Essi is fascinated by history. She collects a lot and creates an archive from which she draws for her work. This allows her to go back and examine both individual and shared memories and histories. She reworks the stories, hoping to strip history of its tyrannical power by creating new scenarios, and perhaps our view of history will change as a result.

In addition to her work in the the exhibition ‘When we see us’, her work was shown in the exhibition ‘Op Scherp’ at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht. The work shown at this exhibition ‘Main Lounge Drinks on the Queen Mary (Cunard Lines)’ was made especially for this exhibition. Her work was also shown in the exhibition ‘Africa Supernova’ in Museum De Kade in Amersfoort.

Repose

Amoako Boafo

In the chapter called ‘Repose’ I chose Amoako Boafo. The primary idea of Boafo’s practice is representation, documenting, celebrating and showing new ways of approaching blackness. Much of his work is inspired by his upbringing, commenting on how men are raised to be aggressive and masculine, which he challenges in his work. Although the artist’s underlying messages are quite intense, there is a certain softness to the works, the poses are serene and the skin is luminous.

His portraits are seductive in their clarity, accentuating the figures in each work, who are regularly isolated on monochrome backgrounds, their gaze the focal point of each work. The brushstrokes are thick and gestural, the contours of the bodies almost softening into abstraction. The most famous of his series, ‘Black Diaspora Portraits’, serve as a means of celebrating his identity and blackness. In 2020, he collaborated with Dior for their Spring/Summer 2021 men’s collection.

Neo Matloga

Neo Matloga’s work was also shown simultaneous in the Netherlands in the exhibition ‘Brave new World’ at museum De Fundatie in Zwolle and later in the exhibition ‘Africa Supernova’ at Museum De Kade in Amersfoort. In 2019, he had an exhibition at the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden which was reviewed on the website of Africanah.org An article about Neo Matloga appeared in the newspaper Trouw.

Neo Matloga creates domestic scenes, orderly, almost cosy, men and women, small groups gathered around a table or together on the couch. They are all memories, scenes usually told in black and white. It is not a reference to the present, but rather to the past. There is a nostalgic quality to his work. In the interview for Trouw, he says that painting has also freed him from his anger about inequality. His figures are constructed from photographs from the family archive, newspapers, etc. The collage technique creates an interesting tension. He draws the figures from different parts of different people, which makes you know that a person never has one characteristic or one trait. The idea that a person can never be reduced to 1 colour, 1 social class, 1 gender, 1 culture is an important constant in his work.

Sungi Mlengeya

Sungi Mlengeya is self-taught. She creates minimalist, monochrome acrylic paintings. Black subjects, mostly women, dressed in white and placed against a white background. They are seductive portraits of blackness and femininity through which she explores self-discovery and empowerment. Her work was also featured in the exhibition ‘Africa Supernova’ at Museum De Kade in Amersfoort.

Sensuality

Njideka Akunyili Crosby

In addition to her work being featured in ‘When we see us’, her work was also shown in the exhibition ‘Brave new World’ at museum De Fundatie in Zwolle. Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s work is often about her ancestors. The perspective is subtly distorted as the horizon lines do not connect. Her work has collage-like surfaces and depicts memory. Memory as an indeterminate space where history, cultures and forms collide and converge, only to reassemble perfectly in form and content.

Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux

Born in Guadeloupe in 1995, he graduated with an MFA from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2023. His work is experimental and documentary, focusing on matrimonial, symbolic and spiritual images. He reappropriates the places and spaces he has traversed through a gallery of portraits, fragments mixed with an intimate history and the larger history of a unique territory, that of the West Indies. His work is a kind of initiatory journey, a reappropriation of an ancestral self that passes through a confrontation with its own darkness before awakening to its own light. A passage from ignorance to self-knowledge that requires the ‘killing’ of illusions. It will be shown at the 2024 Dakar Biennale.

Roméo Mivekannin

Roméo Mivekannin was born in Bouaké (Ivory Coast) and lives and works between Toulouse (France) and Cotonou (Benin). He studied History of Art and Architecture. He has experimented with various media, from sculpture to painting. At the crossroads of inherited tradition and the contemporary world, he integrates his creations into an ancestral temporality, making his own rituals, echoing voodoo cosmology, very present in Benin. Between painting, sculpture and installation, his universe is multidisciplinary. In this video you can watch an interview with him.

Geoffrey Mukasa

Mukasa was born in Kampala, Uganda. He is a descendant of one of Uganda’s most prominent and historic political figures, Sir Apollo Kaggwa (1864-1927), the Prime Minister of Buganda from 1890 to 1926. From 1978 to 1980, Mukasa studied Fine Art at the University of Lucknow, India, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Art. His work was influenced by the Indian master painter M.F. Husain and by European modernists, particularly George Braque and Pablo Picasso. Mukasa returned to Uganda in 1981. For over 20 years Mukasa was a full-time artist, well known in Uganda and abroad as he exhibited all over the world. Geoffrey Mukasa died in 2009 at the age of 55. For more information about Geoffrey Mukasa visit this website.

Chris Ofili

The first time I saw Chris Ofili’s art was at De Kunsthal in Rotterdam in the exhibition ‘In the black fantastic’. Ofili was born in 1968 in Manchester, UK. He creates intricate, kaleidoscopic paintings and works on paper that skilfully blend abstraction and figuration. In the 1990s he created complex and playful multi-layered paintings, which he embellished with a signature blend of resin, glitter, collage and often elephant dung. His work draws on the lush landscapes and local traditions of the island of Trinidad. His work explores the intersection of desire, identity and representation.

Spirituality

Lubaina Himid

Lubaina Himid had her first solo exhibition in The Netherlands at the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem. She was interviewed by Ammodo, you can read the article here and her work was also featured in the exhibition ‘Africa Supernova’ at Museum De Kade in Amersfoort. Originally trained in theatre design, Lubaina Himid is known for her innovative approaches to painting and social engagement. Since the 1980s, she has been central to the British Black Arts Movement in the UK, creating space for the expression and recognition of black experience and women’s creativity. In the last decade she has gained international recognition for her figurative paintings, which explore overlooked and invisible aspects of history and contemporary everyday life.

Cassi Namoda

Cassi Namoda was born in Mozambique in 1988. Her art transfigures the cultural mythologies and historical narratives of life in post-colonial Africa. Her paintings are highly elusive, drawing on literary, cinematic and architectural influences that capture the vastness of her specifically Luso-African point of view. Her work borrows from an art historical canon as well as from vernacular photography. She is equally attentive to landscape, creating scenes that depict both the rural and the urban through a surreal lens.

Triumph and emancipation

Sphephelo Mnguni

Sphephelo Mnguni was born in 1990 in Durban, South Africa. He seeks to document black culture in all its permutations. Currently focusing on painting, he creates portraits of black subjects that boldly engage the viewer and call for recognition beyond cultural stereotypes. His work is inspired by the inequalities he observes and experiences in his daily life, as well as discourses on blackness in South Africa and the African diaspora. He completed his Bachelor of Technology in Fine Art at the Durban University of Technology in 2016. He was interviewed for the exhibition ‘When we see us’.

Fun

My search for ‘how I can learn to relate to African-American art’ gives me great pleasure. Step by step I am beginning to recognise the work of the artists and I am also beginning to see some more connections. In any case, colour makes me happy and there is an abundance of it in these works of art.

These are the sources of information I used: