As featured in the New York Times, ARTnews, Colossal, Metropolis and New York Magazine's The Strategist A groundbreaking A-Z survey of the work of over 300 modern and contemporary artists born or based in Africa Modern and Contemporary African art is at the forefront of the current curatorial and collector movement in today's art scene. This groundbreaking new book, created in collaboration with a prestigious global advisory board, represents the most substantial appraisal of contemporary artists born or based in Africa available. Features the work of more than 300 artists, including El Anatsui, Marlene Dumas, David Goldblatt, Lubaina Himid, William Kentridge, Julie Mehretu, Wangechi Mutu, and Robin Rhode, as well as lesser-known names from across Africa, with stunning and surprising examples of their art paired with insightful texts that demonstrate their contribution to the painting, sculpture, installation, photography, moving image, and performance art. Advisory Panel: Alayo Akinkugbe, Kavita Chellaram, Raphael Chikukwa, Julie Crooks, Tandazani Dhlakama, Oumy Diaw, Janine Gaelle Dieudji, Ekow Eshun, Ndubuisi C. Ezeluomba, Joseph Gergel, Danda Jaroljmek, Omar Kholeif, Rose Jepkorir Kiptum, Alicia Knock, Nkule Mabaso, Lucy MacGarry, Owen Martin, Aude Christel Mgba, Bongani Mkhonza, Riason Naidoo, Paula Nascimento, Simon Njami, Robert Njathika, Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Hannah O'Leary, Sean O'Toole, John Owoo, Brenda Schmahmann, Mark Sealy, Yasmeen Siddiqui, and Joseph L. Underwood

Zina Saro-Wiwa: Did You Know We Taught Them How to Dance? is the first publication on the work of Zina Saro-Wiwa, a British-Nigerian video artist and filmmaker based in Brooklyn. Occupying the space between documentary and performance, Saro-Wiwa's videos, photographs, and sound produced in the Niger Delta region of southeastern Nigeria from 2013-2015 explore folklore, masquerade traditions, religious practices, food, and Nigerian popular aesthetics. Engaging Niger Delta residents as subjects and collaborators, Saro-Wiwa cultivates strategies of psychic survival and performance, testing contemporary art's capacity to transform and to envision new concepts of environment and environmentalism. Known for decades for corruption and environmental degradation, the Niger Delta is one of the largest oil producing regions of the world, and until 2010 provided the United States with a quarter of its oil. Saro-Wiwa returns to this contested region-the place of her birth-to tell new stories. Featuring a guest foreword by Ebiegberi Joe Alagoa; essays by Stephanie LeMenager, Amy L. Powell, and Taiye Selasi; an interview with the artist by Chika Okeke-Agulu; and recipes created by the artist.

This special issue is dedicated to the memory of Okwui Enwezor (1963-2019), the first African and Black curator and director of documenta11 (2002) and the 56th Venice Biennale (2015). The articles and personal tributes collected here recognize the profound impact left by the Nigerian art historian, curator, poet, and educator who transformed the curatorial present of global exhibitions and anticipated their decolonizing futures. Enwezor created political platforms and artistic manifestos that not only changed the form and function of global exhibitions, but also opened up new ways to align activism with aesthetic practices, performative displays, and curatorial initiatives. Contributors-art historians and critics, curators, and artists-address how Enwezor's approach to the exhibition as a "space of public discourse" intersects with theories of affect, indigeneity, race, queer studies, and feminism. Contributors: David Adjaye, Hoor Al Qasimi, Natasha Becker, Naomi Beckwith, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Jody B. Cutler-Bittner, Jane Chin Davidson, Shane Doyle, Tamar Garb, Kendell Geers, Salah M. Hassan, Amelia G. Jones, Abdellah Karroum, Monique Kerman, Mohammed Ibrahim Mahama, Julie Mehretu, Susette S. Min, Wangechi Mutu, Sabine Dahl Nielsen, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Alpesh Kantilal Patel, Anne Ring Petersen, Yinka Shonibare, Penny Siopis, Mary Ellen Strom, Przemyslaw Strozek, Mikhael Subotzky

Written by one of the foremost scholars of African art and featuring 129 color images, "Postcolonial Modernism" chronicles the emergence of artistic modernism in Nigeria in the heady years surrounding political independence in 1960, before the outbreak of civil war in 1967. Chika Okeke-Agulu traces the artistic, intellectual, and critical networks in several Nigerian cities. Zaria is particularly important, because it was there, at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, that a group of students formed the Art Society and inaugurated postcolonial modernism in Nigeria. As Okeke-Agulu explains, their works show both a deep connection with local artistic traditions and the stylistic sophistication that we have come to associate with twentieth-century modernist practices. He explores how these young Nigerian artists were inspired by the rhetoric and ideologies of decolonization and nationalism in the early- and mid-twentieth century and, later, by advocates of negritude and pan-Africanism. They translated the experiences of decolonization into a distinctive "postcolonial modernism" that has continued to inform the work of major Nigerian artists.

Written by two acclaimed scholars Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu, El Anatsui, is the most comprehensive, incisive and authoritative account yet on the work of El Anatsui, the world-renowned, Ghanaian-born sculptor. The product of more than three decades of research, scholarship and close collaboration with the artist, this book shows why his early wood reliefs and terracottas, and the later monumental metal sculptures, exemplify an innovative critical search for alternative models of art making. The authors argue that the pervasiveness of fragmentation as a compositional device in Anatsui's oeuvre invites meditation on the impact of colonization and postcolonial global forces on African cultures. At the same time, the simultaneous invocation of resilience and fragility across his media invests his abstract sculptures with iconic power. Insisting on the intimate connection between form and idea in Anatsui's work, the authors show how, in his critically acclaimed metal works, the manual work of flattening, cutting, twisting, and crushing bottle caps and using copper wires to suture and stitch the elements into one dazzling, reconfigurable epic piece serves as a powerful metaphor for the constitution of human society. This book presents Anatsui as a visionary of incomparable imagination. Yet, it places his work within a broader historical context, specifically the postcolonial modernism of mid-twentieth-century African artists and writers, the cultural ferment of post-independence Ghana, as well as within the intellectual environment of the 1970s Nsukka School. By recovering these histories, and subjecting his work to vigorous analysis, the authors show how and why Anatsui became one of the most formidable sculptors of our time.

Written by one of the foremost scholars of African art and featuring 129 color images, "Postcolonial Modernism" chronicles the emergence of artistic modernism in Nigeria in the heady years surrounding political independence in 1960, before the outbreak of civil war in 1967. Chika Okeke-Agulu traces the artistic, intellectual, and critical networks in several Nigerian cities. Zaria is particularly important, because it was there, at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, that a group of students formed the Art Society and inaugurated postcolonial modernism in Nigeria. As Okeke-Agulu explains, their works show both a deep connection with local artistic traditions and the stylistic sophistication that we have come to associate with twentieth-century modernist practices. He explores how these young Nigerian artists were inspired by the rhetoric and ideologies of decolonization and nationalism in the early- and mid-twentieth century and, later, by advocates of negritude and pan-Africanism. They translated the experiences of decolonization into a distinctive "postcolonial modernism" that has continued to inform the work of major Nigerian artists.