This statement was made by Holland Cotter during a talk at the Centre for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. Cotter was invited as a guest lecturer for an elective graduate seminar on “Contemporary African Art” in September 2021.
The second Black guest curator to organize an exhibition at the Guggenheim was Chaédria LaBouvier, with the Jean Michel Basquiat exhibition “Defacement” in 2019.
This inconclusive list includes at least twenty-three solo or group exhibitions in New York museums, including major surveys for artists like Kehinde Wiley, John Akomfrah, Tracey Rose, and Wangechi Mutu, among others. It includes six solo exhibitions at New York commercial galleries including Skoto, Perrotin, and Lehmann Maupin. The list includes work by curators such as Kevin Dumouchelle, Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Naomi Beckwith, Suheyla Takesh, Sohrab Mohebbi, Leslie-King Hammond, and Lowery Stokes Sims, among others.
This is based on a personal exchange between the curator and author via email concerning the exhibition “The Open Work.”
Hegel claimed that Africa had no history. “What we properly understand by Africa is the unhistorical, undeveloped spirit still caught in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of world history.” G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures in the Philosophy of History, trans. Ruben Alvarado (Wordbridge, 2017). I am also thinking of Maryse Condé’s interest in the deconstruction and reconstruction of stereotypes and clichés. See Dawn Fulton, Signs of Dissent: Maryse Condé and Postcolonial Criticism (University of Virginia Press, 2008).
In a 2024 public discussion between Arthur Jafa and Simone White, Jafa talked about African retentions before pivoting to a discussion of African art. His views diverged from White’s. See →.
Serubiri Moses, “Content Sharing and Mistranslation: On Global Aspirations and Local Infrastructures,” in Forces of Art: Perspectives from a Changing World, ed. Carin Kuoni et al. (Valiz, 2021).
Okwui Enwezor, “The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994. An Introduction,” in The Short Century: Independence and Liberations Movements in Africa, 1945–1994, ed. Okwui Enwezor and Chinua Achebe (Prestel, 2001).
I have taught a full graduate seminar on Okwui Enwezor in the art history department at Hunter College, and have featured his exhibitions in a graduate seminar at Bard College and an undergraduate seminar at New York University. Here I am referring to graduate students in Hunter College’s art history department.
See Olabisi Silva, “Africa 95: Cultural Celebration or Colonialism?,” in Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art, no. 4 (1996).
“Before a Zuma court appearance in September 2008: ‘If you don’t leave Jacob Zuma alone we will make this country ungovernable …’, attributed to an unknown member of the protest group from the ANCYL outside the court as they burnt an effigy of Thabo Mbeki.” J. C. M. Venter and A. Duvehage, “The Polokwane Conference and South Africa’s Second Political Transition: Tentative Conclusions on Future Perspectives,” Koers 73, no 4 (2008) →.
Arnaud Gerspacher, “New Museum Triennial, ‘The Ungovernables,’” e-flux Criticism, March 17, 2012 →.
For a sustained reading of Steve “Bantu” Biko’s political writing and his contribution to the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa, see Tendayi Sithole, The Black Register (Polity Press, 2020); and T. Sithole, Steve Biko: Decolonial Meditations on Black Consciousness (Lexington, 2016).
Holland Cotter, “Quiet Disobedience,” New York Times, February 8, 2013.
Andrew Stefan Weiner, “Kader Attia’s ‘Reason’s Oxymorons,’” e-flux Criticism, February 28, 2017 →.
Octavio Zaya, “Transterritorial: The Spaces of Identity and the Diaspora,” Art Nexus, no. 25 (1997) →.
“I am the first Latin American curator to be appointed as an artistic director of the visual art sector of the Biennale. Though, I’m not the first curator from the Global South, because Okwui Enwezor was of course a curator before me. But I’m the first one actually living and based in the Global South.” See →.
Zaya, “Transterritorial.”
Moses, “Content Sharing and Mistranslation.”
Holland Cotter, “Nontraditional Angles on an Africa Seldom Exposed,” New York Times, March 21, 2006.
See Okwui Enwezor, “The Uses of Afro-Pessimism,” in Snap Judgements: New Positions in African Photography (ICP, 2006); and Kevin Okoth, “The Flatness of Blackness: Afro-Pessimism and the Erasure of Anti-Colonial Thought,” Salvage, January 16, 2020 →.
Okwui Enwezor, “Chinua Achebe,” Artforum 51, no. 10 (Summer 2013).