...Tobias Wofford African art has played a role in the practices of studio-trained African American artists since the Harlem Renaissance. As knowledge about African art has grown and changed, so too have the ways in which artists have appropriated such art and imagined their relationship...

... critical access to the kind of work that artists are doing in terms of African American representation. At the same time, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art was convened due to the lack of representation and misrepresentation of what constitutes African art. For far too long, people who have...

...Chika Okeke-Agulu Copyright © 2017 by Nka Publications 2017 From the Editor Alain Locke’s 1925 essay “The Legacy of Ancestral Arts,” in which he called on African American art...

...Cherise Smith Jordana Moore Saggese’s Reading Basquiat: Exploring Ambivalence in American Art is a monographic study of Jean-Michel Basquiat, an artist who experienced a near meteoric rise and fall. In four chapters, the author gives the artist’s work the scholarly and historical attention...

... Angeles’s African American Arts Community Carolyn Peter and Damon Willick Gallery 32 offered a space where people could express n late 1968 a very young Suzanne Jackson opened an independent voice in their work and not be an art gallery west...

...—an American-bred Nigerian artist, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, and an African American, California-based artist, Brett Cook—with emphasis on the various dimensions of their art in engaging with people within a mostly unfamiliar environment and culture. Copyright © 2017 by Nka Publications 2017 smARTpower...

... by the two major movements in African American art of the twentieth century—the New Negro Arts movement and the Black Arts movement—Jones’s unique black perspective was often viewed through the mask, a symbol of classical African art and a signifier of black identity. For her, it acted as muse...

... of the portrayed — Lovell’s tion, to yield up a kind of truth.”8 50 • Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art • 26 • Spring 2010 Morrison works within the realm of human grating American forces, they were deployed with truths, not verifiable facts, and thus draws a criti- French troops...

... African American coming to terms with Marikana, the analgesic may, art and South African art, with particular focus on like its connotative title Mine, belong to the artist artist and museum praxis. She is curator of African alone. She has completed Mine before the ill-fated American...

... and 1970s. Cahan’s research into four museums—the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem—reveals how art institutions responded incrementally to black artists’ demands for equity. Despite the different degrees...

..., transforming Ringgold herself into a black feminist. At the same time, the Black Light series displays her formalist and aesthetic concerns regarding the larger American art scene, with which she was thoroughly familiar as a well-trained artist conversant with the European and American modernist canons...

... successive tiers of social abstraction in contemporary culture as they become visible and embodied in art objects. Copyright © 2012 Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 2012 Glenn Ligon, Warm Broad Glow II, 2011. Installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art. Neon, paint, and powder-­coated...

... used yams as part of several measures itself against a global scale and escapes installations and sculptures referencing Africa. the too often reductive discourse applied to African Yams, after all, are related to colonization and were American art as socially and racially determined...

... of the Black Arts movement’s most central ar- buoyancy could still be found. “Negro” became “Af- tistic collectives, the African Commune of Bad ro-American”. “Afro-American” became “black”. An Relevant Artists, or, more commonly, AfriCOBRA. increasing sense of racial pride emerged alongside Formed...

... their message into a wilder- of the chattel slavery of Africans in the Americas. ness . . . of believers. Walker is an African Ameri- Interracial interaction threatened the integrity of can artist, but is she performing African American the slave system and led to formal legal bound- art? When I viewed one...

... at the University of Florida in the School of Art and Art History. Her research interests include American art and visual culture of the African diaspora...

... and has expanded in scope through recent attention from a subsequent generation of African American artists, including several students as well as art scholars. White (1918–79) was vocally committed from the mid-1960s through his final decade to African American art subjects in tandem with social issues...

... and the African diaspora, thus possessing an archive of images of late twentieth-century African American life, especially African American spiritual culture. Her work can be found in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Library...

...- versity Press, 1975). Kobena Mercer is professor of history of art and Afri- 18. Connelly, Modern Art and the Grotesque, 15. can American studies at Yale University. He writes 19. Thompson, Becoming Animal, 14. 20. Quoted in Storr...

... as an “elder of distinction” at CONFABA 70, an African American art history conference held at Northwestern Uni- versity in 1970. She describes herself as part of “the cadre” — a group of students involved with the con- ference.1 In a sense Copeland also insinuates a bloc. He reuses her words...