Authored by Kris Juncker

Janet Stanley, Librarian at the National Museum of African Art, has been actively collecting monographs dedicated to the lives and work of Modern and Contemporary African artists for four decades. Around 2013, Stanley began to maintain the annotated bibliography, “Monographs on African Artists,” online. The purpose of the collection is to communicate the important twentieth and twenty-first-century stories of artists who have a global impact.

Up until the Post-Colonial period in Africa, the western world—including acclaimed European artists, such as Picasso—routinely dismissed African art as “primitive.” Signaling a tide of change, Curator Alissa Lagamma’s 1998 exhibition and accompanying article, “Beyond Master Hands: The Lives of Artists,” began to ask that audiences begin to value African art for far more than just craft purposes. Rather, she pointed to ways in which historical African fine art exhibits critical aspects of the artists’ biographies. In this same period, Dr. Sylvester Ogbechie, wrote a biography on the modern Nigerian artist Ben Enwonwu (2008). At the National Museum of African Arts’ collection of books, and the online list of annotations continues to grow, these monographs point to a changing tide of public opinion and appreciation.

As a stand-out example, shown here, the 2018 volume, Victor Ekpuk: Connecting Lines Across Space and Time, by Ekpuk and Toyin Falalo offers an opportunity for audiences to see a mid-career retrospective of Victor Ekpuk’s work. With fourteen different contributing authors, and more than 300 images, this book offers different perspectives of the artist’s work from the late 1980s to the present. The volume points to growing scholarship and an art market that celebrates Ekpuk’s work and that of his contemporaries.

Essayists featured in the book include Fine Arts Professor Moyo Okediji, who knew Ekpuk during Ekpuk’s studies at the Ife Art School in Ile-Ife, Nigeria. Okediji’s essay speaks of a growing intellectual community of contemporary Nigerian artists. Tucked into the middle of the book, Ekpuk includes a few dozen of his illustrations for Nigeria’s Daily Times in the 1990s. These drawings were often political in nature and foundational for the graphic style that Ekpuk developed over the course of his longer career in the United States.

Other essayists contributing to this volume met Ekpuk following his move to Washington D.C.  These colleagues discuss Ekpuk’s ongoing focus upon ideograms, or graphic symbols. Ekpuk draws upon graphic art and drawing practices from Nigeria and throughout continental Africa to find inspiration for his creative, abstract ideograms.

Ekpuk works with a variety of media, including drawing, painting and sculpture. This volume’s concluding group of images offers unique views of the temporary installation work and seems to indicate that there may be more largescale, and temporary, work ahead. At this mid-point in Ekpuk’s career, the volume offers some understanding of the larger, social and political commentary of the artist’s work. Further, this monograph points to changes in the artworld, and among audiences, recognizing how Modern and Contemporary artists shape our understanding of what is beautiful and moving today.

References

Ekpuk, Victor. 2018. Victor Ekpuk : Connecting Lines across Space and Time, Edited by Toyin Falola. Austin, Texas: Pan-African University Press.

LaGamma, Alisa. 1998. “Beyond Master Hands: The Lives of the Artists.” African Arts, 24–37.

Ogbechie, Sylvester Okwunodu. 2000. “Ben Enwonwu and the Constitution of Modernity in 20th Century Nigerian Art.”

—. 2008. Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist. Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Stanley, Janet (Ed.). n.d. “Monographs on African Artists: An Annotated Bibliography.” Accessed