From the Editors: Nka at 20

In 1993 a small idea conceived in an apartment in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, gave birth to Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. The idea was simple: to create an intellectual space for artists, writers, critics, art historians, and curators, in which the work of African artists could be examined with incisiveness, critical acuity, and theoretical reflection in such a way as to bring the subject of contemporary African art and artists to the international mainstream and to show why this work constitutes an important element of an expanded global contemporary art. While the idea of contemporary African art was not new twenty years ago, it was still remarkable to observe how the field was routinely collapsed into the discourse of anthropology rather than art history/criticism, while not a few scholars simply regarded the very idea of contemporary African art with suspicion. To be sure, Nka, at its inception, did not necessarily set out to offer a critique of ethnographic reason or to strenuously disentangle the discourse of contemporary African art from the strong attachment to anthropological realism that for the most part created a disciplinary pastiche of African art with little distinction between aesthetic methodologies, conceptual definitions, and narrative modes. The goal of the journal was thus to offer a space in which the work of African artists could find an audience capable of making those distinctions and scholarship that could engage the emerging work with the same critical sophistication already evident in it.

After more than a year of wide canvassing and consultation with a network of art historians; artists; writers; critics working in Africa, Europe, and the United States; and supporters of diverse positions, the journal’s inaugural issue was publicly presented at the African Studies Association conference in Toronto in the fall of 1994. This year, then, marks the twentieth anniversary of the first issue of Nka. Given the difficult circumstances under which the journal was published in its early years, its longevity is, in itself, no mean feat. Institutional support for a magazine committed to an as-yet-unrecognized field was virtually nonexistent. In the years since, the journal has attracted funding from a number of institutions and individuals who believe in our mission, and it has enjoyed invaluable partnerships, chiefly with Cornell University and Duke University Press, our current publisher. We remain grateful for those relationships as we look to the future.

When Nka came out in 1994, contemporary African artists were just beginning to make their presence felt in the global art scene, which at the time was undergoing radical transformation, with a range of insurgent practices staking positions in contemporary artistic discourse. Looking back to the intervening years, we are now able to survey how much has changed, not only in the field of contemporary African art, which Nka, from the outset, has sought to define as its locus of critical examination, but also in the wider field of contemporary art across the globe. The transformation of the last quarter-century has occurred along multiple tracks: in exhibitions, museum collections, criticism, art history, galleries, art fairs, and auctions, and among collectors, to the extent that the global scope of contemporary art is today clearly affirmed.

It is in consideration of the journal’s catalytic role, seen through the critical endeavors and work of the editors of the publication, along with the work of the artists, critics, writers, historians, curators, and students who have contributed over the years to its pages, that we came to the juncture where enlarging the understanding of the practices of African artists became coextensive with broadening the field of global contemporary art as such. The journal’s content over these years is in fact a veritable critical history of contemporary African art of the past two decades, as well as a map of its continental and diasporic manifestations. As editors of the journal we are immensely privileged to have contributed to the making of the expanded landscape of contemporary art and to have participated in the debates that have emerged from it.

Much has changed indeed. El Anatsui, one of the artists featured...