From the Editor's

When we announced, in issue no. 44 of this journal, the March 15, 2019, death of our dearest friend, brother, and colleague Okwui Enwezor, we promised to find an appropriate way, beyond mourning, to commemorate him and celebrate his work and legacy. Two years have passed and we are still working, in collaboration with various institutions on different continents, on some long-term initiatives to conserve his library and archive and to collect his published and unpublished writings in dedicated volumes. These are challenging tasks, but we are fully committed to their realization in the coming years.

The decision to devote an entire issue of Nka to Okwui was one of the initial plans we had, yet only the fortuitous alignment of happenstance and intention made this current issue possible. In April 2020, just as the world was shutting down in response to the spreading devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, we heard about a panel dedicated to Okwui's work at the 108th College Art Association Annual Conference in Chicago, February12–15, 2020. After reviewing the panel information from the conference website, we contacted the two chairs, Jane Chin Davidson and Alpesh Kantilal Patel, both art historians based, respectively, at California State University, San Bernadino, and Florida International University. Soon, we invited them to guest edit the section of this issue, consisting of articles by established and emerging scholars who either critically engage Okwui's work as a curator, or see his ideas as foundational to ways of understanding the role and place of art in a global and postcolonial context.

For many today who associate Okwui's name with unparalleled mastery and command of the praxis and discourse of contemporary art, it may be anything but surprising that his work has become the subject of vigorous scholarly examination in academic theses and dissertations, book chapters, and art journals, and, yes, profiles in glossy fashion and lifestyle magazines. That is as it should be. Even so, we must note how truly remarkable and exceptional Okwui's career was and how dramatic his impact has been on the art world of the past three decades.

In early 1994, Okwui reached out to a number of us—young artists, critics, and scholars scattered on three continents—who through our individual practices sought to rethink the shape of things in the different art scenes we inhabited: if in Africa, how to invigorate criticism and scholarship on contemporary art to compete favorably on the global stage; outside of the continent, how to pull our intellectual resources to fundamentally challenge the poor reception and perception of the work of African and African diaspora artists. To take on these urgent tasks, he needed each of us to join him in the birthing of a journal of contemporary African art that he would call Nka, the Igbo word for art or craft. Nka, he argued, would "work towards building the kind of forum necessary to help unite and engage the different spectrums of African viewpoints on 20th century cultural practices."¹ Yet, he did not invite only African viewpoints; he called on anyone willing to devote a "critical intelligence and open-minded analysis" to the study of contemporary African art to join us in the work of establishing a vigorous discourse.²

Twenty-six years later, we believe that Nka has more than fulfilled Okwui's original dream, not only because it has become, indisputably, the foremost platform for critical discourse and scholarship on modern and contemporary African and African diaspora art. The small team Okwui convened in 1994, in its work within and outside the journal, helped establish what is now a vigorous field of study in the academy and a thriving sector in the international art industry. Nka has indeed come a long way from the early days when Okwui solicited donations from family and friends to ensure that we kept to our publishing schedule. Artists first profiled in our pages and contributors who published their first articles here have respectively become well-known names and leading scholars. Nka's success, which we hope will outlive us, is indeed a monument to Okwui...