Okwui Enwezor and the Art of Curating

Okwui Enwezor was the eminent theorist, critic, and curator who transformed the definition of the "global exposition," and with great respect, this special Nka journal issue commemorates the philosopher-historian whose passing on March 15, 2019, was a tremendous blow to the art world. He was one of Nka's founding editors, and we understand the immense privilege to be invited by Chika Okeke-Agulu and Salah Hassan to contribute our edition of articles to honor him. The opportunity came after we presented our panel "Curatorial Impacts—the Futures of Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019)" at the College Art Association (CAA) Annual Conference in February 2020.

Futures of Enwezor

Enwezor has been a profound influence, a dynamic figure who embodied the political intellectualism that we continue to strive to emulate. In this introduction, we will discuss our personal stakes in this endeavor and provide a conceptual framework, based on Enwezor's influential writings and curatorial practice, through which to consider the articles by Natasha Becker, Monique Kerman, Amelia Jones, Susette Min, Anne Ring Petersen and Sabine Dahl Nielsen, Przemyslaw Strozek, and Mary Ellen Strom and Shane Doyle, along with a brief description of their contributions. To begin with, we will reflect on our experience putting together the panel in order contextualize the fraught and political field of art history and to underscore why Enwezor's work is and will continue to be so important for those of us, including the contributors, who are attempting to write ethically for the field.

The "Curatorial Impacts" panel was meant to bring together the art historians, artists, curators, researchers, and art critics who also saw Enwezor as an important intellectual. We thought our call for papers would be flooded with submissions, if indeed other panels commemorating him did not create a competition. To our complete surprise, we received only a few responses to our Call for Proposals (CFP), and no other panels of the kind emerged at the 2020 CAA conference. After speaking with our colleagues about this unique situation, we started to realize that in the minds of the art world, Enwezor was considered as an exhibition curator and biennial organizer and not as an "academic"—the repetition of this statement among those we questioned was weirdly revealing. The implication is that CAA is more academic and, therefore, the lack of submissions not surprising, leaving us with the question: What exactly is this distinction between the academic and the curatorial, given that Enwezor had fulfilled the fluid role of professor/historian/researcher/curator in many different contexts? His various teaching positions included visiting professor of art history at the University of Pittsburgh, at Columbia University, and at New York University as the Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Professor. Also, Enwezor was not a stranger to the College Art Association, having been awarded the CAA Frank Jewett Mather Award in 2006 "for significant published art criticism." Reassessing, we organized the CAA panel to proactively invite panelists whose scholarly practices are also fluid between curating and writing.

There is no question that Enwezor was a scholar (if not an "academic"), and thus it was clear that there were other factors driving the outcome of our CFP. So, what was the reason for the frankly anemic response to our call for papers? Was it simply the particular perception toward the exhibition world by those in the academic universe? We can never know for sure, of course, but at least part of the reason, we posit, is the underlying xenophobic unconscious that persists in the discipline of art history. For instance, organizations such as the USA Africa Dialogue Series (the virtual sociocultural forum), rooted in African studies, had reposted our CAA Call for Proposals, which was entirely welcomed, but it was telling that we were not seeing the CFP announced by groups exploring contemporary art more generally. The important point is that Enwezor was especially influential in the way his research for both curating and art history crossed seamlessly from African studies to contemporary art subjects not necessarily marked by region. Therefore, another goal for the panel, and by extension this...