El Hadji Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics

Beyond a traditional exhibition catalogue, El Hadji Sy: Painting, Performance, Politics offers not only the typical curatorial/contextual essays, but also the original source materials pertaining to this pioneering artist. In fact, the publication's greatest contribution might be its assemblage of archival photographs, posters, invitations, newspaper clippings, handwritten letters, and other ephemera related to Sy's career. These accompany the sumptuous, full-color photographs of paintings that represent the artist's thirty-five years of activity. As the curators—Clémentine Deliss, Yvette Mutumba, and Philippe Pirotte—and guest essayists recount Sy's wide-reaching impact on the artscape of Senegal—including Dakar's École des Beaux-Arts, Laboratoire AGIT'ART, Tenq workshops, the Huit Facettes collective, and both iterations of the Village des Arts—these ephemeral, peripheral materials from personal archives richly animate Sy's prolonged engagement with politics and art. His engagement reverberated internationally, particularly with multifaceted German networks of collection, exhibition, and criticism. The solo exhibition at the Weltkulturen Museum (Frankfurt) sprang from...