A distorting mirror – Africa seen from the West

Associated media

The Global Africa Project

Edited by Lowery Stokes Sims and Leslie King-Hammond

‘The Global Africa Project’, conceived by the Museum of Art and Design, New York, was intended to acknowledge the under-representation of Africa in the museum’s exhibition and acquisition activities. The Museum, with new premises and curatorial expertise, launched its project in 2007, intending to stage an interdisciplinary exhibition of fashion, design, art and craftsmanship. 

The original idea was to concentrate on design, craft and art created on the African continent. As if this were not sufficiently ambitious, the project was expanded beyond Africa’s geographical borders by curator Lowery Stokes Sims, to ‘demonstrate the migratory careers of many designers, craftspersons, and artists of African descent and heritage’. This decision directed research and exhibition objectives to African American practitioners and postmodern eclecticism, at the expense of artists and designers working in Africa.

Diaspora politics in the United States foreground a language issue which generates conflict between national lived identity and historical place of origin. Americans use the term ‘African American’ but to outsiders these black people are first and foremost American Africans.  They speak American, practice consumerism like other Americans, and embrace American lifestyles.

All artists can acquire knowledge about Africa quickly and easily from factual and promotional websites and this feeds the eclecticism and appropriation characterizing much postmodern imagery. Little wonder then, that artists and designers claiming African origins might be tempted to see Africa’s richly diverse material and visual cultures as sources for exploration.  This is unproblematic but the insatiable art market, driven by Western capitalism, condones superficial visual references to style and subsequent distortion of cultural meaning. The Global Africa Project is thoroughly American in ambition and realisation; the publication speaks about American art and institutions and the insidious pressure of the global art market. Africa remains the poor relation contributing to the identity and esteem of affluent distant descendents.

Africa offers numerous opportunities for research, exhibitions and publications.  There is abundant evidence of creativity in art, design, craft, and fashion within Africa but the Museum of Art and Design chose to see this through the prism of American interests. The Global Africa Project seems to have been a convenient label under which to collect and exhibit any art, design or craft object that is ‘contemporary’ and has some link to Africa.  Even the co-curators acknowledge in their essay that ‘The challenge of The Global Africa Project is indicated in its title’.  They never satisfactory resolve this difficulty. 

The inclusion of work done outside Africa brings in practitioners who are part of the Western (and global) art market and its institutions. Their relationships to local communities, economic structures, and historical identity are different from those of Africans within Africa and the juxtapositions of work by African artists and works by established Western artists are awkward. What, for instance, has Yinka Shonibare, British-born, British-educated and an acknowledged British artist got to do with the Ardmore ceramic artists working in KwaZulu-Natal, in a region ravaged by HIV/AIDS? A black skin is not a satisfactory answer because Caucasian Keith Haring is also included for his depictions of choreographer Bill T. Jones and for a Free South Africa poster, which implies that American anti-apartheid posters are deemed more significant that than the large number produced by black South African political activists.

People who were born in Africa may now be resident outside the continent for all sorts of reasons, not the least being the fact that many artists of African origin have been lured by dealers to New York or Paris to earn a living for themselves and their sponsors. Inside Africa, migration continues to be a lived reality, the product of famine, politics (both local and global), violence and poverty. Amazingly, art, design and craft enterprises continue to produce astonishing evidence of the creative human spirit.

Despite the confused objectives of the project, the accompanying publication contains a lot of information.  The design and layout are generous and the illustrations speak more eloquently than the texts, none of which advance very insightful discussion.  Indeed, the illustrations radiate the aesthetic beauty, materiality and processes that constitute the objects and images selected but, the devil being in the detail, captions confirm that many illustrations originate from American practitioners and New York galleries, whose commercial interests will not have been harmed by alignment with ‘The Global Africa Project’. Similarly, the Artist Profiles section lists 99 entries on individuals and collectives, each with a biography, website and artist’s statement but within many biographies lies the telling phrase ‘was born in [somewhere in Africa] but moved to [usually the United States]’.

The organizers of ‘The Global Africa Project’ were right to admit that African art and design were poorly represented in their exhibition and acquisition activities but it is a pity that they did not formulate the Africa project before tackling the more problematic and ambitious ‘global’Africa project, which seems less concerned with African culture and its visual expression than with the commodification expected by American capitalism. That said, the illustrations make their point powerfully: inventiveness, ingenuity and creativity exist worldwide and remind us that these human attributes are truly global.

The Global Africa Project by Lowery Stokes Sims and Leslie King-Hammond (Eds.) is published by Prestel 2010. 224 pp. 200 colour illus. ISBN 978-3-7913-5084-4