Tony Mhonda Helps Bring Contemporary African Art to America

Visual art consultant, author and sculptor Tony Mhonda has been awarded a Black Advancement African-American Renaissance award for his contribution to contemporary African art in America.

The humanitarian art award was given to Mhonda at the Oakland University, Berkeley, San Francisco during the Black History Month celebrations last month. Mhonda's writings on the practice of contemporary visual arts in southern Africa were selected as the best out of a total of 1,320 submitted from around the world.

Last year, he was given a Sterling Award of Excellence in cross-discipline visual art and economics research at the Centre of Innovation and Research in Graduate Education from the University of Washington, Seattle, in the United States.

He was associate editor for Southern African Art Journal at the National Art Gallery of Zimbabwe in 1994. He also corresponded as an art critic for The Herald (1989-1998), the now defunct Horizon magazine and The Standard newspaper.

In 1993, he served as the deputy head of the National Gallery while he was in his early 20s and was responsible for securing the dual corporate sponsorship of Anglo American and Mobil Oil for the Zimbabwe Heritage Annual exhibitions.

In 1995, Mhonda was elected as the founder president of Association Internationale des Critiques d'Art (AICA) based in Paris, France and represented Zimbabwe at various international art symposiums in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Unite States.

Mhonda is one of the few artistes to attain international post-graduate degrees in Post Modern Art Theory and Philosophy and a doctorate of Business Administration of Arts and Post-colonial Heritage Studies (DBA).

"DBA research is vital for Zimbabwe's global identity -- it challenges us to create new knowledge, new approaches, new innovations and insights to enhance business decision making, especially in times of economic set backs," Mhonda said.

Source: allafrica.com

African Art Celebrated at Joburg Art Fair Last Week

Recession or not, the art world goes on, and never was this more obvious than at the Joburg Art Fair this past weekend.

For those of us who thought that the tough economic times would put a damper on the occasion, we couldn’t have been more wrong.

The price tags were certainly not shy (a particularly unique and gorgeous Kentridge work at the Goodman Gallery stand was going for a weighty R1 083 000) and among the 23 galleries participating, there were quite a few red “sold” dots to behold.

This is a phenomenon that Ross Douglas, director of the company Artlogic, which runs the Joburg Art Fair, commented on during the media walkabout on Friday March 26.

“For me, one of the really interesting things about the Fair is that if you’d tried to do an art fair in SA eight years ago, there wouldn’t have been enough galleries,” he says.

“But in the last four or five years, suddenly a whole lot of galleries started up.

“Last year was a really difficult year financially, and what we’ve seen is that these galleries, despite this really difficult recession, have managed to sustain themselves,” Douglas says.

“We’ve lost two SA galleries between last year and this year – Warren Siebrits and Bell Roberts – but I’ve been amazed at how galleries have managed to sustain themselves through what has been a very long and difficult year.”

However, it’s not just the buyers and art connoisseurs who got their two cents worth from the Fair.

There has always been an educational angle to the weekend, which is why there were a series of free art talks by experts in the field running throughout all three days of the Fair.

“One of the ideas behind the Fair is to make it really accessible to people, to get people inquisitive about art, and interacting with art, and the talks are a nice way to understand art,” explains Douglas.

Chili Hawes, director of the October Gallery in London, which has exhibited at the Fair for three consecutive years, says that she can see people’s enthusiasm for art increasing.

“Especially this year, I see a lot of people really keenly looking at the work, and so that’s very refreshing to us,” she says.

“People really appreciate it and love it and seem to be interested in it and learning about it.”
Arguably of the best offering that the Fair provides is access to international galleries’ stands, because as Douglas says, SA galleries focus on SA art, whereas some of the international galleries focus on art from the rest of the continent.

For those folks who spent part of their weekend at the Fair, the chance to see works never before seen in SA would certainly not have gone unappreciated.

To read our original posting on the 2010 Joburg Art Fair, click here.



Source: The Citizen
By: Natalie Bosman

Frank Frazier's African Paintings on Display

The exhibition, “African Art Tradition & Influence: Frank Frazier, Painter” at the King Arts Complex in Columbus, Ohio will show the artistry of African Textiles. The pattern forms and styles are raffia cloth from Zaire, Kente of the Ashanti and Ewe, Bogolanfini mud dyed cloth of Mali, Aso Oke of Yoruba and Khasa blankets of Mali, Adinkra stamped cloth from Ghana. These textiles reflect the excellent quality of style and design which have inspired and influenced many artists. Guest curator George Miller, CEO & founder of Black Arts Plus Gallery, augments the exhibition with selected works from the international artist, Frank Frazier. Frazier, a collagist, sculptor and painter, works with oils, watercolor, charcoal and other materials drawing his influences from artifacts and artisans in Senegal, Gambia and Sierra Leone, West Africa.

The exhibition will run from Thursday, April 08, 2010 through Monday, May 31, 2010 in the Elijah Pierce Gallery.

For more information on Frank Frazier visit http://www.artistfrankfrazier.com.

African Art & Cloth at SLAM

The St. Louis Museum of Art is in a state of flux as galleries within are closing and objects are being moved because of construction and the building’s expansion. In preparation for the Museum’s expansion, several galleries have been closed, and highlights of the Museum’s collection have been reinstalled. Collection highlights were carefully chosen by the Museum’s curators in anticipation of the expansion project.


Highlights of the Museum’s African collection have been reinstalled on the Lower Level in Gallery 103. This reinstallation includes a selection of the most significant objects from the Museum’s collection of African art, selected and curated by William C. Siegmann, consulting curator of African art.

However, despite limited space, SLAM is still running the African Ceremonial Cloths exhibition from now until May 9th 2010.

The museum’s description: For more than a thousand years textile trade and production have flourished in sub-Saharan Africa. Cloths made for ceremonial use still play a significant role in many societies, conveying wealth, status, artistry, and fashion through striking combinations of color, bold design, and coded patterning.

This free exhibition presents a selection of large textiles from West, Central, and East Africa. Made of bark cloth, raffia, silk, and cotton, they showcase masterful examples of strip weaving, woven patterning, resist dyeing, stenciling, and embroidery.

Some of the cloths were made to serve as garments. Wrappers from the Ewe, Igbo, and Baganda cultures were wound around the waist or draped over the shoulder to create a robust presence for the wearer. Other cloths were hung or held behind dignitaries to create environments or backdrops for ceremonial occasions.

The production of ceremonial cloths can involve multiple processes by diverse groups in a complex division of labor, with distinct roles for male and female artisans.

The works presented in this exhibition reflect an increased interest in African textiles and a steady growth in the Museum’s acquisition of these fabrics through purchase and generous gifts in recent years. Several very large pieces have not been exhibited in their entirety until now; some of the works are being seen for the first time.

Obituary - Irwin Hersey

Born Irwin Herskowitz, editor and nationally known authority on tribal art died in Manhattan April 2 at age 89.

Born September 15, 1920, Mr. Hersey was a graduate of City College and received his masters degree from Columbia University. In World War II he was commissioned and trained as a Japanese linguist and served in Tokyo on General MacArthur's staff. He was recalled to active duty in Korea. He left the army a captain and worked as a business editor for Fairchild and Hearst Publications. In 1957 he became editor of the Journal of the Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics and director of publications of the American Rocket Society. Later he became a consultant to cities wanting to expand business meetings and conventions, worldwide. His knowledge and expertise of African tribal art led to his work as an appraiser and was among the first to try to provide professional standards to the field. From 1978 to 1983 he founded and edited the Primitive Art Newsletter. Objects from his collection are represented in major U.S. museums. He is survived by his wife Marcia.

Exhibition of tribal art from India opens on note of controversy

Other Masters From India — Contemporary Creations of the Adivasis,' a stunning exhibition of contemporary tribal art from India opened on Monday at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris.

Conceived and curated by Jyotindra Jain, the former director of the Crafts Museum in New Delhi and one of India's foremost historians and chroniclers of tribal art, this exhibition is not just a visual and aesthetic treat; it has been put together diligently and intelligently, taking the viewer down the years, from the time when tribal art was ritualistic and iconographical, confined to the walls of Adivasi homes, to the present when art has enabled contemporary artists to give voice to their existential predicaments, thus transforming their artistic space.

Rare photographs

The entire credit for this exercise goes to Dr. Jain's scholarship, knowledge and aesthetic sensibility. Most of the writings and several rare photographs in the detailed and richly illustrated catalogue have been contributed by him. However, the exhibition has been marred by the fact that Dr. Jain, who spent three years working on this project, has not been given adequate credit for his contribution.

The exhibition begins by examining, with some fine old prints and photographs as well as video footage from Bombay masala films, the representation of the Adivasis over time. British colonial times, when anthropologists working on theories of race measured, recorded and photographed tribals as belonging to certain “racial” types, gave way to the calendar art of the 1950s and 1960s and the caricatural depiction of the tribal by Bollywood.

Section Two entitled ‘The People' presents Adivasi populations in a non-linear manner, each one of them being characterised by its material, ritualistic and artistic productions. Gigantic Bhuta sculptures from Karnataka, made of jackfruit wood and used in ancestor worship or appeasement have been brought all the way from the Crafts Museum in New Delhi. “Some of these pieces are about 150 years old and no museum outside India has a piece of this kind,” Dr. Jain told The Hindu in an exclusive guided tour of the exhibits.

There are objects here of incredible beauty, grace, colour and cultural and religious significance: Magical healing amulets from the Nicobar Islands, votive terracotta figures from the Ayyanar tribe in Tamil Nadu, bronze figurines from Bastar (Gond) and Orissa (Kondh), clay storytelling sculptures from Sarguja in Chhattisgarh, votive tablets from Rajasthan, paintings from the Rathwa tribe in Gujarat or the jadupatua scrolls from the Santhal tribes of Bihar or West Bengal.

Contemporary artists

But the most interesting section of the exhibition is the third one, which concentrates on contemporary artists and offers visitor a series of popular paintings with a special emphasis on two remarkable artists, Jivya Shoma Mashe of the Warli tibe in Maharashtra and Jangarh Singh Shyam, a Gond from Madhya Pradesh who tragically killed himself while working as a artist in residence in Japan in 2001.

This section is visually extremely gratifying in the most contemporary “artistic” sense, where tribal art steps out of the confines of the purely ritualistic to give voice to concerns such as urban encroachment, violence practised by the state, and the influence of modern technology. In one of the Santhal scrolls, Yama, the God of death, is shown wearing a policeman's uniform, a telling comment on how the guardians of the law are perceived by a largely disenfranchised and oppressed population. Trains, airplanes (which are part mechanical, part mythical creature) telephones, mirrors, thus mingle with harvests, fields and creatures of the forest, sometimes, as in the case of a train, completing cutting the artistic space in two.

Unfortunately, the museum has failed to fully recognise Dr. Jain's work. Despite assurances given by the museum, the erratum sheet detailing the missing credits is not an integral part of the catalogue. A belated loose leaf insertion in no way corrects the error, for once an exhibition has been dismantled, the curator has only the catalogue to show for his pains.

When questioned by this correspondent, Helene Fulgence, director of exhibitions, said that in the French system, when writers of “notes” were not identified, the work was automatically presumed to be that of the overall director of the exhibition, its curator. However, she suggested Dr. Jain could have been let down or “betrayed” by his assistant, Vikas Harish.

Mr. Harish placed the blame firmly on the Quai Branly Museum: “I am not responsible for the errors. I kept Dr. Jain fully informed. I was not in charge of the publication of the catalogue.”
As the blame game continued, with a senior museum official very rudely ticking this reporter off for “giving out the wrong message,” Ms. Fulgence confirmed that Dr. Jain had not been shown a PDF version of the catalogue for his approval. She told The Hindu that had the museum honoured its commitments to Dr. Jain, it would not have been able to bring out the catalogue in time for the “official inauguration” on Monday. The exhibition opens for the public on Tuesday.

Source: The Hindi
By: Vaiju Naravane

Queens, NY artist exhibits African Art

Well-known abstract painter and sculptor Daniel “Danny” Simmons, Jr. is finding his way home to Queensborough Community College (QCC) in Bayside – for an exhibition of his work.

“House of The Spirit” showcases original oil paintings and mixed media projects, as well as Simmons’s collection of African Art – including sub-Saharan religious art – that inspired his works.

The exhibit, in the QCC Art Gallery at 222-05 56th Avenue in Bayside, runs through May 7.

“Our entire community – especially our students – will enjoy his vibrant form of artistic expression,” said Faustino Quintanilla, Curator of the QCC Art Gallery.

“His passion for the rich tradition of African art, contrasted with his playful approach to painting . . . compliment our permanent African Art collection nicely,” Quintanilla said.



“This exhibit is the first public showing of my entire African art collection, which is very precious to me,” Simmons said.

Simmons is the co-founder and chairman of Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation, which provides disadvantaged youth with arts access and education. He also founded Rush Arts Gallery and the Corridor Gallery for aspiring artists.

“I went to Cardozo High School and spent a lot of time at Queensborough, so it is an honor to return years later and be recognized for my art,” he said.

He and his brother, music mogul Russell Simmons, established Def Poetry Jam, a long-running series on HBO. He is also the author of Three Days as the Crow Flies, a fictional account of the 1980s art scene, and I Dreamed My People Were Calling But I Couldn’t Find My Way Home.

“Knowing the QCC Art Gallery has the third most important African art collection in New York City, next to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, is astounding,” Simmons said. For more information, visit www.qcc.cuny.edu.

Source: Queens Courier
By: Victor G. Mimoni