From the Editor

Chinua Achebe, the great novelist and thinker, and one of Africa’s most respected wise men, during times of great urgency that required moments of clarity and lucidity was fond of deploying an Igbo proverb that says: “You have to know where the rain started beating you in order to learn when your body began to dry.” Achebe, who passed away on March 21, 2013, used this proverb to address Africa’s endemic situation of crisis, in order to say that the solutions to Africa’s problems lay simultaneously in a form of rigorous self-analysis and self-understanding.

But how do we confront the problems of contemporary African art in view of the statement “We are in at the death of all that is best in African art . . . ,” made by the eminent British anthropologist William Fagg more than five decades ago, as modern African artists made the transition from tradition to modernity? Fagg was perplexed by what was happening in the arts of Africa in the hands of young, confident African artists as they explored new forms and ideas of art making.

When we started Nka twenty years ago, it was precisely founded on the principles of self-analysis and self-understanding that were the hallmarks of Achebe’s deeply reflective life as a writer and a moral philosopher. However, for us, it was also to prove the point that Fagg’s basic analysis of the state of African art at the end of colonialism largely misapprehended what was happening within modern and contemporary African art. Writing the inaugural editorial in the first issue, I wanted to capture the challenges faced by a magazine of this kind that would be devoted to a field still at a critical stage of development. What Nka was then, and has remained ever since, is a forum of ideas for scholars, writers, and historians, and a platform for artists and curators to constitute, through our best efforts, the field of contemporary African art. And to do so with lucidity, address its multiple discursive spaces, and examine the complex aesthetic, artistic, and cultural projects that flow out of the field with clarity and critical intellectual purpose.

The two decades that have passed since that first editorial have seen rapid changes in the field of art history, exhibitions, museums, auctions, and collections. Contemporary African art and artists are no longer novel or fodder for collectors who harbored a certain frisson for exotica. Instead, they have become deeply embedded in the rich dialogue between artistic spaces across the world. The careers of the editors of this magazine parallel these changes and transformations occurring within both art history and the museum. In fact, our own work has engendered some of the discussions that led to changes that we see unfolding. At the same time, each of us has benefited from the expansive audiences that have become part of the discursive spaces of contemporary African art.

This editorial emerged out of a recent keynote lecture that I presented at the 2013 conference of the British Association of Art Historians (AAH), held at the University of Reading in April. I was invited to speak on the evolving nature of art history today, particularly as it touches on the intersection of the discipline with curating. On accepting the invitation, I thought about how I might reconcile the intersection of the subject within my own particular area of competence, namely, contemporary art and contemporary African art through my work as a curator and writer, but also as the director of a museum and several major biennials and international exhibitions, and as the dean of a college of art. My presentation focused on the interface between exhibition and museum practice, and the historical journey made by African artists in the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries into the discipline of art history and into museum collections.

My main compass of exploration was contemporary African art and its various states of being and becoming in the museums and art histories of the past, present, and future. However, the challenge as I saw it was how the museums and art histories of the future...