Issues of Race and Originality

"Many black artists are caught in their own nostalgia and mythology about what art by black artists should be about... Africanizing of imagery by people, many of whom have never been in Africa, they are choosing imagery that has already been overworked."
by Leslie King-Hammond, dean of graduate studies, Maryland Institute College of Art.

NeoAfricanisms and Modern Art

What appears so familiarly 'modern' to us may actually be a conditioned response to an African Aesthetic that we have learnt to associate with Picasso, but that he borrowed from African traditions of figurative abstraction... The Andalus-ian, far from inventing the style we now call 'modern' simply alerted the West to this other way of seeing. The man who diverted the course of western art owed MORE to Africa than the African who reshaped the course of Modern 'African' Art owed to the West.
by Gerard Houghton in El Anatsui.