“Daringly Experimental and Versatile”: African Arts and the Contemporary Unavailable

It's fair to say that African Arts' 1993 coverage (vol. 26, no. 1) of the Center for African Art's exhibition “Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art” constitutes a watershed moment in the journal's relationship with contemporary African art. Including wildly differing reviews by Olu Oguibe and Francesco Pellizzi as well as a response to them by Sidney Kasfir, the journal used the 1991 exhibition as a vehicle for thinking about the state of contemporary art on the continent. Moreover, with a first word by Thomas McEvilley that explicitly asked about the very category of “contemporary African art,” this particular issue of African Arts followed and reinforced debates raging about contemporary art at the time. It also helped to define how Africanist art historians would think about the field—at least in the journal's pages—into the early twenty-first century. From that moment, in addition to groundbreaking research articles on modern and contemporary...