African American Artists on Issues of Museums and Representation of African American Art

DAVID HAMMONS Artist BILLHUTSON Painter AL LOVING Artist STANLEY WHITNEY Painter DAVID HENDERSON Writer JAMEEL MOONDOC Composer NORMAN DOUGLAS Writer DEIDRE SCOTT Writer/ Curator SUR RODNEY SUR Archivist GERALD JACKSON Painter STEVE CANNON Poet/ Writer and Publisher MATTHEW DEBORD Associate Editor, Nka MODERATED BY OKWUI ENWEZOR Publisher and Editor, Nka OKWUI ENWEZOR The basic reason for this forum grew out o f an interest to provide the public critical access to the kind o f work that artists are doing in terms o f African American representation. At the same time, N k a : J o u r n a l o f C o n t e m p o r a r y A f r i c a n A r t was convened due to the lack o f representation and misrepresentation o f what constitutes African art. For far too long, people who have come in contact with African art, have sort o f seen it as being deeply embedded in ethnographic studies. And to decouple ourselves from that sort o f viewpoint that does nothing but exoticize Africa and put Africa perennially in a colonialist type o f mentality. N k a decided that rather than go back and deal with what everyone views as "traditional " African art, what we wished to engage is the work that contemporary African artists are doing today, more as a means o f entering into the larger arena. Contemporary African art as conceived here is not limited to just Africa or African artists. It is simply, the necessary starting point from which we can enter other streams o f practice. T h e necessary conjunction that brings us here today deals with the merging o f the aesthetics that has formed itself out o f the very turbulent terrain o f American history, which for whatever reasons, all o f us here share some kind o f heritage. And in that sense, David H a m m o n s , as an artist whose work I've 3 4>NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art • Spring/Summer 1995 AFRICAN AMERICAN ARTISTS ON ISSUES OF MUSEUMS AND REPRESENTATION OFAFRICAN AMERICAN ART One issue with every artist that's very basic, is that an artist has to create his own venue to promote himself. If we don't create our own situations to produce our own personal self and wait for a megastructure to produce us, we're going to sit by the window with the candle on. David Hammons been familiar with over the years, became a catalyst for this forum. His having harnessed some o f the sources from, say the Minkisi tradition , and his constant exploration o f the vernacular type o f African American tradition and put them in his work—that's of great interest to me. I approached him to do a little piece whereby I would put h i m together with Stanley [Whitney] to have a dialogue, like the show they did in Naples, Italy. But David felt that the focus has been a bit too much on h i m . He wanted us to expand and deal with the larger issue of representation, in a metaphorical sense, but also in a literal sense. The springboard being the "Black Male" show at the W h i t n e y , which o f course a lot o f people are quite disillusioned about what was put out there. At the same time, the Whitney is not necessarily the totality of what we are here to discuss. We can take it as a starting point and enter into other issues of representation or whatever else anyone wants to talk about. So when this magazine gets to Africa it becomes that necessary dialogue that opens out, I feel like this is the first time that the voices of African artists and African American artists have been able to come together in this site of what Paul Gilroy termed the "Black A t l a n t i c " — the Black Atlantic being both the site of turbulence and the site o f renewal. So this for me represents a renewal, a new sense o...