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.
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