Dakar's Art Scene: In the Street and in the Global Art World

Joanna Grabski's book about Dakar's art scene complements earlier studies, such as Harney's In Senghor's Shadow: Art, Politics and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960-1995 (2004) and Snipe's Arts and Politics in Senegal, 1960–1996 (1998), by introducing us to contemporary developments in this Afropolitan capital. But it is also, and more importantly, a book about Dakar that joins a body of new(ish) literature on the city (Fredericks 2018; Melly 2017; Simone 2004a, 2004b) in taking us onto the streets of Dakar's popular neighborhoods, through bottlenecks, garbage piles, markets, and artists' studios, to offer important insights about urban infrastructures. The art scene in its pages unfurls in multiple interconnected urban sites, which, in addition to markets and studios, include streets themselves as a place for sourcing materials, exhibition sites, and the Dak'Art Biennale, an important contemporary art exhibit, whose thirteenth edition took place in 2018. As a counterpart to its visual character, the Dakar art scene is articulated through narratives by artists, visitors, collectors, and journalists. Artist Soly Cissé, for example, claims that "visitors come to the studio because they want to see and hear more" (98), while Fally Sene Sow keeps a journal in which he writes about Colobane, the neighborhood that is the subject of his collages behind glass (105). The narrative, the visual, and the material thus work together in contributing to what Grabski terms the creative economy of the city.

What is an art world city? And how do we parse it?—as an (art world) (city) or an (art) (world city)? Drawing partially on Howard Becker's (1982) elaboration of the concept of "art worlds," Grabski proposes a paradigm to account for "the imbrication of the creative economy and the urban environment[,] as well as the interplay of local and global dynamics shaping Dakar's art world" to define the art world city as a "multiscalar, urban site for artistic production, mediation, and transaction" (3). Then, starting at 17 rue Jules Ferry, the courtyard studio of the late Joe Ouakam, an artist and omnipresent public figure, who even after his death in 2017 continues to appear in effigy in various exhibitions, Grabski proceeds to guide us through the city to explore how ideas about art in Dakar are cultivated though practices of visibility, mediatization, conversations around objects and with artists, sourcing of materials from the urban environment, and transactions between artists and buyers. What emerges is a complex set of practices and a dense network of actors who through their agency and engagement with the creative economy constitute Dakar's art scene. The growing importance of the Dak'Art Biennale might in itself be grounds enough to posit Dakar as an art world city, but this is not Grabski's argument. The view in Art World City is a local view from Dakar, and it is the affordances of Dakar's urban status that make it a node in an interconnected and increasingly globalized art world, especially since the 1990s. Grabski's attribution of the artist's studio as an infrastructure of opportunity could be extended to the city as a whole because Dakar, in addition to being the site of a major biennale, is a place of creative expression from which artists increasingly participate in exhibitions and art fairs across the globe.

In the opening to "Picturing the City" (chapter five), Grabski draws our attention to Démarches urbaines, a group exhibition by three urban artists, Cheikh Ndiaye, Modou Dieng, and Mohammed "Mookie" Coulibaly, held at the IFAN museum in April of 2000, as an artistic turning point, which both "exalt(ed) the city as generative of representational forms" and "declared that urban-referential propositions merited our regard and contemplation" (175). For anyone who has followed the development of Senegalese art since independence, once dominated by mythic representations of a rural Africa of masks and sculptures, a focus on the city represents a truly new engagement, which Grabski, in chapter four, attributes to an urban turn in the pedagogy of the École des Arts in the early...