The View From Here: Contemporary Perspectives from Senegal

It's rare that Americans can view a snapshot of contemporary African art made in one center by a sizable number of artists at a specific point in time. Without the opportunity to travel to Johannesburg, to Lagos, to Kinshasa, we lack that sense of a particular African art scene that thrives on its own zeitgeist, on the friendships and rivalries of its protagonists, on the deprivations and abundance shared by those who are not yet household names. The View from Here provided that kind of window into Dakar's specific arts environment. Like Paris in the early twentieth century, the city itself may sprawl, but the microcosm its artists occupy creates a special energy, a magnetized pull that draws in painters, photographers, and other artists from Senegal and beyond. Even in the relatively compact space of Kent State's Visual Arts Gallery, this exhibition clearly communicated Dakar's sense of hustle, bright lights,...