Second Careers: Two Tributaries in African Art

Visitors to Second Careers: Two Tributaries in African Art first encountered five striking photomontages in Tahir Carl Karmali's 2013 Untitled (Jua Kali Series) (Fig. 1). Using images of urban cityscapes alongside repurposed computer and car parts, the works reimagine select Kenyan creatives—including the artist—as Afrofuturist cyberpunks personifying the creative possibilities of the media surrounding them. As the show's introductory text explained, Karmali's series embodied “the materiality and accumulation” of an “array of salvaged materials” found across the work of the six twenty-first-century African artists featured in Second Careers: Elias Sime, Nnenna Okore, El Anatsui, Zohra Opoku, and Gonçalo Mabunda, and Karmali. But it also pointed to what Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, the exhibition's curator, framed as the continuity of these artists’ practices with historic African artforms. The Jua Kali Series’ label, for example, pointed to a similar “evocation of diverse materials” including pins, horns, ropes, and beads, on a...