...Manthia Diawara; Terri Geis Ellen Gallagher and Edgar Cleijne ON THE ART OF BECOMING Manthia Diawara and Terri Geis We must everywhere create the concept of particular opacities, against reductionist and universalizing humanism. In a world of Relation, which is in the process of taking over...

...Salah M. Hassan The 2015 Egyptian Surrealists in Global Perspective conference, and the companion 2016 exhibition When Art Becomes Liberty: The Egyptian Surrealists ( 1938–1965 ), both held in Cairo, Egypt, explored the history and evolution of the work of Egyptian surrealists and their remarkable...

... genres, Barnor would migrate into creating a singular portfolio of street and studio portraiture depicting societies in transition: images of a burgeoning sub-Saharan African nation moving toward independence and a European capital city becoming a multicultural metropolis. In the process, Barnor would...

...Margo Natalie Crawford How did the Black Arts movement become an antitext movement? How did the black aesthetic of this movement use the tension between the bound and the unbound? This essay examines the movement’s critique of a dominant “museum exhibit” cultural industry that transformed grass...

... beautifully into the language of contemporary art. Most important, if we strip cosmopolitanism completely bare and look beneath its seductive veneer, its real potential and beauty becomes visible, revealing a commitment to ethics and a genuine engagement with the plight of others. When contemporary artists...

...Ola Seif When the Art and Liberty group launched its activities in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the young Levon Boyadjian (later to become the famous Van-Leo) and his elder brother, Angelo, were jointly debuting their careers as photographers in Cairo. Van-Leo’s archive of photographic prints...

... of surrealism produced clear and essential modernist trends that have become characteristic of these arts. Copyright © 2021 by Nka Publications 2021 Georges Henein Egyptian surrealism Les Essayistes Un Effort Deraisons d’etre GEORGES HENEIN A Model for Egyptian Surrealism Bachir El Sibaei...

... North, the global South, and in between. Discarded objects become critical signifiers of the fever of waste-producing consumerism—notably, though not exclusively, in the postwar, fast-growing Luanda where Chagas currently lives. By rearranging these objects into new configurations, Chagas is also...

...Hisham Aidi Hisham Aidi traces how Malcolm X—and the black freedom movement, more broadly— have become central to Muslim youth consciousness today. He traces how today, as during the early 1960s, various governments—the United States, Britain, Iran, and Saudia Arabia—have been trying...

..., these tensions fuel her creative work on the musical stage and also in the realm of fashion and style; they become a way of naturalizing the oddness and radicality of her liberating and liberatory rhetoric concerning racial stereotypes, gender norms, class assumptions, and perceptions of sexuality. Examining...

... as exemplars of good grooming in their sartorial attention to detail as words for the ladies danced off their tongues like Lord Kitchener’s calypso. These “lonely Londoners” would later become Jamaican rude bwoys, swaggering as if to a ska or reggae beat in their two-tone mohair suits, with the attitude...

...Brett M. Van Hoesen Over a decade ago, the contemporary artist Mwangi Hutter, comprising Ingrid Mwangi and Robert Hutter, merged names and biographies to become one artist, despite differences of gender, race, age, and cultural backgrounds. Based in Berlin and Ludwigshafen, Germany, and Nairobi...

... in Gateshead, United Kingdom, and Temple Gallery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania— Heart Beat both speaks to and acts on its presumptive Euro-American viewers. Its message, the author argues, is that in today’s globalized world, where life itself has become marginal to the pursuit of capital, all human beings...

... began her career making figurative oil pastel and charcoal portraits that have become synonymous with black artistic practices of the 1980s. This article presents a new reading of three of these iconic portraits— Auntie Enid–The Pose (1985), Missionary Position II (1985), and Big Women’s Talk (1984...

.... Heterotemporal refers to the synchronicity of being black in the contemporary, which includes ideology, space, time, and history. This history is inescapable because, however advanced the scholarship may become, it has to connect to the context in which it is performed as well as embrace the fact...

... the narratives and bend an association of ideas so that a black individual in a period setting is no longer synonymous with slave subservience and, by extension, does not instill fear or mistrust. She becomes the center of her own tale and hastens it forward. Creating pieces that simulate Old Masters’ techniques...

... fundamentalist historical narratives. Sembène’s films imagine alternatives to the recorded past and become a resource for continuous reinvention: Guelwaar inscribes a path out of divisive ethnoreligious essentialisms into a unified vox populi, and Ceddo uses the imagery and rhetoric of slavery to expose...

... of photographing the project becomes a new artistic performance on its own right, a process in which the artists and the photographer entered into a separate dialogue and negotiation of their own. This article reproduces many of Simpson’s photographs, along with her accompanying text, “Spirits.” Copyright © 2012...

...-prints from The End of an Era (2010), The Brave Ones (2010), and Hope Chest (2012), represents the work of an artist whose images have become iconic in both postapartheid South Africa and the international art world. The End of an Era ’s still lifes attest to the grooming habits, romances, and interests...

... 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...