Celebrating African Arts at 50 and Its Place in Africa

The first copies of African Arts I saw were in Jean Borgatti's office at University of Benin, Nigeria, during her 2002–2003 Fulbright tenure. Then I was a graduate student in Painting. I was impressed by the sharp color and black-and-white photographs that give more life to the essays. I got my first two copies of African Arts (vol. 23, no. 3, July 1990, and vol. 34, no. 4, Winter 2001) as gifts when I came to the Fowler Museum, UCLA, to give a talk on my artistic project at Worcester State College (now Worcester State University), in Worcester, MA. I was at WSC for three months as the first recipient of the Philip L. Ravenhill Fellowship, administered by the Fowler Museum. In one of the two copies I got, Philip Ravenhill wrote the First Word titled “The Challenge of History.” Ravenhill, in this introductory essay, mourned the practice of exhibiting...