Visual Culture Out of Africa

International Mon 21-02-2011

Visual Culture Out of Africa
By Roberta Smith |www.nytimes.com

DNA aside, huge portions of everyday life and cultural achievement are unthinkable without Africa.

What would Modern art be like if Matisse had never gone to Morocco or if he, Picasso and the German Expressionists had never set eyes on the sculptural innovations of sub-Saharan Africa?

Very hard to say. And popular music? Around the world, it incorporates sounds and rhythms that originated in Africa. More locally, jazz — not Abstract Expressionism — was the first American art form of international stature.

Image Courtesy of TheNewYorkTimes.com

“The Global Africa Project” at the Museum of Arts & Design tries to survey this pervasiveness, in terms of contemporary visual endeavors of all kinds: jewelry, fashion, architecture, basketry, ceramics, painting, utilitarian design.

This sprawling cornucopia has been wrested into existence by Lowery Stokes Sims, former director of the Studio Museum in Harlem and, since 2007, international curator at the Museum of Arts & Design; and Leslie King-Hammond, former dean of graduate studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art and, since 2006, founding director of the institute’s Center for Race and Culture.

Image by Daniele Tamagni

This show presents 200 works by nearly 120 people, teams and collectives. It represents artists, designers, artisans, D.I.Y. improvisers and people engaged in various combinations of those already fuzzy job descriptions, toiling in ways that blur aesthetics, sociology and philosophy.

Astoundingly ambitious for a relatively small institution, “Global Africa” aims, in the words of its news release, to explore the “impact of African visual culture on contemporary art, craft and design around the world.”

Unsurprisingly, the exhibition does not fully meet that tall order. It suffers from an excess of high-end luxury items and a shortage of genuine quality-of-life-changing design solutions. And unfortunately, it almost completely ignores Africa north of the Sahara. It is also plagued by too much ersatz stuff in all categories.

To read this review in full click here

“The Global Africa Project” continues through May 15 at the Museum of Arts & Design, 2 Columbus Circle; (212) 299-7777, madmuseum.org.

Posted By: Diana Achieng

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