Search results for ""Author Joshua I. Cohen""

Reading African art’s impact on modernism as an international phenomenon, The “Black Art” Renaissance tracks a series of twentieth-century engagements with canonical African sculpture by European, African American, and sub-Saharan African artists and theorists. Notwithstanding its occurrence during the benighted colonial period, the Paris avant-garde “discovery” of African sculpture—known then as art nègre, or “black art”—eventually came to affect nascent Afro-modernisms, whose artists and critics commandeered visual and rhetorical uses of the same sculptural canon and the same term. Within this trajectory, “black art” evolved as a framework for asserting control over appropriative practices introduced by Europeans, and it helped forge alliances by redefining concepts of humanism, race, and civilization. From the Fauves and Picasso to the Harlem Renaissance, and from the work of South African artist Ernest Mancoba to the imagery of Negritude and the École de Dakar, African sculpture’s influence proved transcontinental in scope and significance. Through this extensively researched study, Joshua I. Cohen argues that art history’s alleged centers and margins must be conceived as interconnected and mutually informing. The “Black Art” Renaissance reveals just how much modern art has owed to African art on a global scale.

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From 19th-century studio practice through the independence era, African photography has best been known for modes of portraiture that crystallize the sitter’s identity and social milieu. Even portraits by contemporary artists are often interpreted as windows into African realities. This exhibition reconsiders African contemporary photographic portraiture by presenting four practitioners whose concerns range well beyond questions of social identity. Sammy Baloji, Mohamed Camara, Saïdou Dicko, and George Osodi expand their subjects’ interpretive possibilities, exemplifying a new creativity and versatility in portrait-making. While each artist employs different strategies, they all challenge the assumption that photographic portraits serve as mirrors of the “self.” Baloji’s montages dislocate the subject historically, Camara probes the boundaries of the portrait genre, Dicko expresses uncertainty at the possibility of representation, and Osodi engages his subjects as platforms for political commentary. The four artists enlist portraiture as a point of departure for exploring subjectivity, history, and photographic form. The Expanded Subject offers new insights into the expressive and conceptual range of African photo-portraiture today.

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