Africa Explores

Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art was a travelling exhibition and accompanying exhibition catalogue devoted to twentieth-century artistic production in sub-Saharan Africa. Curated by Susan Vogel for the Center for African Art in New York, it opened in 1991 at the Center for African Art and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. The New York presentation comprised about 133 works from 15 African countries. Vogel divided the material into five curatorial categories: Traditional Art, New Functional Art, Urban Art, International Art, and Extinct Art. The last category was identified in later touring materials as Past in the Present. After opening in New York in May 1991, the exhibition travelled to the University Art Museum in Berkeley, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Center for the Fine Arts in Miami. The Center for African Art and Prestel published a 296-page catalogue edited by Vogel with assistance from Ima Ebong. Its contributors were Walter van Beek, Donald John Cosentino, Bogumil Jewsiewicki, Thomas McEvilley, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Ebong. The exhibition included works by academically trained artists, self-taught urban painters, photographers, sculptors, coffin makers, sign painters, ceramicists, and producers of ritual and functional objects. The artists represented included Sunday Jack Akpan, Kane Kwei, Chéri Samba, Tshibumba Kanda-Matulu, Moké, Sokari Douglas Camp, Magdalena Odundo, Ouattara Watts, Trigo Piula, Iba N'Diaye, Malangatana Valente Ngwenya, and Kivuthi Mbuno. Contemporary reviews and later assessments addressed the exhibition's scope and curatorial approach, including its classification of the works and the presentation of objects across different institutional settings.