For decades, many art students were only really exposed to African art and artists through the lens of curios and crafts and their influence on Matisse, Picasso and other famous 20th-century artists.
That idea of African art as an exotic, primitive form whose greatest contribution was through its influence on Western creatives continued all the way into the 1980s when Nigerian-born British artist Yinka Shonibare was studying in London.
As he recalls: “When I was at college we were not taught about any African artists and the African art that we were exposed to was through a Western gaze. Now African artists are fashionable and there’s been the rise of artists like El Anatsui and Kerry James Marshall and others who depict the realities of black experience.”
Shonibare has just turned 60 and over three decades he’s established himself as one of the foremost artists of his generation through his witty, provocative and curious multidisciplinary interventions that serve to place the black experience very much back in the foreground of art history and representation. So it should come as no surprise that he’s turned to the story of African art and the modernists for his latest show, Restitution of the Mind and Soul at the Goodman Gallery in Cape Town.
Inspired by a deep dive into the private collections of African artefacts of Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Modigliani and other modernists, Shonibare’s exhibition uses several of his signature methods and materials to reframe the conversation and thinking about the relationship between Africa and the West and the influence of African aesthetics on shaping the 20th-century canon.
The exhibition consists of classical sculptures clothed in the distinctive batik printed fabric synonymous with Shonibare’s work — their heads replaced with African masks drawn from works in the modernists’ collections. These are accompanied by a series of brightly coloured hand-stitched quilts illustrating artefacts from the collections.
The choice of quilts as a medium is, as always with Shonibare, a carefully considered one. Quilting has a particular place within the African-American community as an artistic tradition that's served to record history, build communities and keep traditions alive since the darkest days of slavery in the US.
As Shonibare acknowledges, these works may share similarities with previous creations in their aesthetic and themes but, he says, “I see each new work as a meeting of my interests with something in the zeitgeist that leads to an examination of a new aspect of the relationships between Africa and Europe, colonialism and identity politics.”
The remainder of the exhibition is made up of hand-painted masks and a slide projection of archival images from Paris in the 1920s and ‘30s, when Africa was all the rage. Jazz and Josephine Baker were the toast of the town and African-American artists who formed part of the Harlem Renaissance, like Langston Hughes, were wined and dined at the tables of the city’s high society.
Shonibare sees something of that moment in the current era where African art and artists are hot property for hungry one-percenter art collectors.
“In the 1920s there was a similar trend for Africa in Paris and with the popularity of the Harlem Renaissance. What happened with those may offer a cautionary tale for now,” he says. “With the Depression in 1929, the support for the Harlem Renaissance and other black art fell away and suddenly they were no longer popular.
“I hope that what we're seeing now is a real shift in power relations and that we as African artists continue to play a major role in the art scene. But we must be careful that it isn’t just a trend that suddenly ends and leaves us back in a similar situation.”
Shonibare’s next project is the launch in November of his long-dreamed-of artists' residency space in his native Nigeria. The Guest Artists Space (G.A.S) Foundation offers residency programmes for artists in Lagos and on a 22ha working farm in Ijebu. He’s particularly happy about the farm, which is about growing food and being self-sustaining. “This is vitally important in this moment of climate change and economic uncertainty.”
For now, though, he seems cautiously optimistic by what he sees as a “growing awareness about the uneven power dynamic in the arts between Africa and the West. There have been encouraging signs, like the return of artefacts to Africa,” he says. “I hope that in a small way my art has helped to unravel some of these relationships and added to the conversations about identity and the effects of colonialism.”
• 'Restitution of the Mind and Soul' is at Goodman Gallery in Cape Town until November 12. For more information, visit goodman-gallery.com
