In 1960, on the occasion of their home country gaining independence from Britain, two Nigerian artists offered less-than-celebratory paintings: one, a cockfight; the other, a rocky landscape. In Folly (1960), Demas Nwoko painted a rooster and a guinea fowl having at it: feathers flying, beaks scraping. The lurid tones visualized clashes within both nationalist politics (green and white for the Nigerian flag) and internationalist, Pan-African ones (black, green, and red for Pan-African flags).
In Olumo Rock (1960), Afi Ekong opted for a subtler political allegory, and her oil-on-canvas appeared in the first survey of contemporary African art in the United States, in 1961. With earth-toned impasto strokes, she evoked the craggy entrance to the titular mountain located in Abeokuta, where the Egba people sought refuge throughout the 19th century as political rivals waged war in the region.
Both works sidestep the mythology commonly associated with the romanticized pageantry of decolonization. Like so many of the works that appear alongside them in “African Modernism in America, 1947–67,” they speak to the rich range of artistic responses to the entanglement of midcentury modernism, African nationalism, Black internationalism, and Cold War geopolitics. The 70-work traveling exhibition centers around an impressive selection of oils, but also features sculptures, lithographs, and watercolors from African and diasporic artists.
By midcentury, in both North America and Africa, formal colonialism and racial hierarchy were slowly being dismantled for an elusive freedom. The exhibition carefully contextualizes Black art from this period, focusing on exchanges and complex dynamics between African artists and American patrons.
For white art patrons, it was only after World War II that African art came to be seen as “modern,” rather than stuck in some primitive past. Which is ironic, as Western Modernists infamously mined this “primitive” art for their innovative forms. But by midcentury, American philanthropists and the State Department began sponsoring tours for contemporary African artists. They also began funding exhibitions and purchasing African art for private and public collections. The exhibition maps these institutional arteries in its first and second sections, using the artworks exhibited by those institutions or created by Africans when they visited the United States.
The first US survey of contemporary African art, the one that featured Ekong’s Olumo Rock, was mounted in 1961 at the Harmon Foundation, a white philanthropic institution whose purported mission was to promote racial equality. The Foundation helped facilitate the Museum of Modern Art in New York’s first acquisition of African art: Sam Joseph Ntiro’s luminous canvas Men Taking Banana Beer to Bride by Night (1956). At the time, Ntiro was participating in a funded visit to the US. Dozens of other artists did the same across these two decades—among them Ben Enwonwu, Skunder Boghossian, Demas Nwoko, and Ibrahim El-Salahi. Virtuosic examples of their work during this period offer a rare opportunity to see the foremost African modernists in conversation with one another once again.
Much of the capital that lubricated these exchanges was dispensed with a specific motivation: Cold War diplomacy. State officials and philanthropists endeavored to win Global South hearts and minds over to liberal democracy by funding exhibition tours or travels in the US. The Harmon Foundation was close to, though never formally affiliated with, the State Department; the Carnegie Corporation enabled Ntiro’s American sojourn, having received clandestine funding from the Central Intelligence Agency for such tours.
View of Ndidi Dike’s installation The Politics of Selection, 2022, in “African Modernism in America, 1947–67” at the Kemper Museum, St. Louis.
Photo Alise O’Brien/Courtesy Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis
Looking past these intriguing stories of Cold War espionage, one can tell many histories of African and Black art this way: by tracing the individuals and infrastructures that still shape the conditions of artistic production. These include state officials, paternalist philanthropists, white-led institutions, and curatorial gatekeepers.
I’d argue, in fact, that we can still tell the story of today’s Black art this way: a 2018 study by the Mellon Foundation found that 84 percent of museum leadership, curators, conservators, and educators were white, and another in 2017, from the American Alliance of Museums, found that half of American museum boards were completely white.Rather than framing this Cold War moment as unique, this show draws attention to the continuities that still shape the reception of African and Black art.
More important, though, the show sets this dynamic against a parallel history in the third section: the Black institutions, galleries, and collectors equally responsible for this effervescent moment of cultural production. Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are the protagonist here: they have long been places where African contemporary art was taken seriously—a fact the show makes plain by displaying some of those items from their collections, alongside work by artists they employed.
Meanwhile, groundbreaking gallerists like Merton D. Simpson were responsible for bringing a generation of African artists to American attention. Indeed, the Harmon only began taking an interest in African art after a Nigerian artist, Akinola Lasekan, sent the foundation samples of his work in 1947; they are on display here for the first time since
the 1960s.
Other pieces show how African American artists made use of funding sources for cultural exchange that were born of the Cold War to spark ongoing engagement with African modernism. John Biggers’s UNESCO-funded tour of West Africa in 1957 was a source of lifelong inspiration for him, and he passed it down through generations as a teacher at Texas State University for Negroes (now Texas Southern University). His lively Kumasi Market (1962), we learn, was a favorite of its original collector, Maya Angelou.
The exhibition pieces together transatlantic aesthetic exchanges at a moment when African and diasporic artists were experiencing a new kind of visibility. But its narrative is by no means an idealized, triumphant one. Instead, it’s a nuanced look at the ways white-led institutions and governments utilized African art, and how Black artists both benefited from and were hampered by this support.
The show culminates with a new commission by Ndidi Dike, a collage installation titled The Politics of Selection (2022). It’s a tribute to Afi Ekong and many other neglected modernist women artists, curators, and gallerists, made with materials from the Harmon Foundation’s archives. The work echoes the show’s many impressive conservation efforts, among them Ekong’s Olumo Rock, which, like many other works here, is on view for the first time since the mid-20th century.
When the Harmon closed in 1967, it donated its holdings to two HBCUs: Fisk University in Nashville, and Hampton University in Virginia. In a rare art history reversal, this trove of African contemporary art was entrusted to Black institutions. Now, this archive of Black modernism can continue to teach us about externally imposed conditions of modernity and the efforts of African and diasporic artists to reshape them.