Effects of Contemporary art on Culture and Identity of African Artists

How big of a role do culture and identity play in our current society? This is a question we need to ask ourselves. From the beginning of civilization your background, social standing, and even name played a massive role into who you would become and what you would be able to do and achieve. There has always been segregation when it came to matters that would be influenced by either your culture or background. This is seen in many examples like in Ancient Egypt if you were not of noble blood you were destined to work as a slave or in the mines for what was the remainder of your life and you had no choice In the matter, whereas if you were of noble birth or blood you would live a lavish life never to know the struggles of life. Through all this, we invented discrimination and segregation of different cultures and in turn different races in the near future. In modern times we see segregation of culture and race in almost everything we do and almost if not everywhere we go. In films like Hidden Figures, we see the cast show us a view of how discrimination of culture is affecting and plaguing our current society. You can clearly see the sexist and racial discrimination where the main actor “Dorothy Vaughan”, Played by Taraji P Octavia Spencer, has to run about 2 miles just to use the bathroom because apparently her kind, Coloured People, are not allowed to use or share the same Toilet services as the white folk. We see the sexist nature in this film whereby the character is ridiculed for performing a task that is seen as a “Man’s Job” and is supposedly supposed to be grateful for even having the opportunity to undertake the task.

Artists often explore the characteristics that determine our personal and social identity. They construct a sense of who we are as individuals, as a society, or as a nation. They question stereotypes and conventions while exploring attributes such as gender, sexuality, race, nationality, and heritage. In many instances, classical traditions provide a background against which to appraise the present expression. For many African artists, a commitment to traditional values is a fundamental element in the alchemy of creative genius. Some synthesize allusions to the past with contemporary content; others create imagery with mythical or ritual references. But the artists, though rooted in tradition, use materials, methods, and images foreign to traditional art, and their art is usually based on a personal aesthetic.

These artists, who have emerged throughout sub-Saharan Africa in the last forty years, and who are working in new ways with new materials, address their art to a wider public. in the past, their relationship to a community gave them structures and styles. Now, often separated by thousands of miles, the artists are linked in a network of the literary, performing, and visual arts by conferences, festivals, exhibitions, and literary movements. Despite problems of great magnitude - many of them attributable to colonialism - the artists continue to redefine Modern African Art, reflecting the changing social, political, and cultural environment.

In recent times artists have toyed around with the notion of what is an art and what is considered appropriation of art and whether it is wrong or right. Take Kara Walker, for example, A piece of artwork that comes to mind is the Sugar Sphinx called “A Subtlety” which was also known as “The Marvelous Sugar Baby” and was subtitled as an Homage to unpaid and overworked who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World. This was a white sculpture depicting a woman with African features in the shape of a sphinx, but also included fifteen other sculptures. This was a massive statement to the world and also a protest to the Demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant. Kara Walker explores the raw intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in her work, crafting vivid psychological narratives from a contemporary perspective on historical conditions. Over the past two decades, Walker has unleashed the traditionally Victorian medium of the silhouette onto the walls of the gallery, creating immersive installations that envelop the viewer. She has a desire to fix the problem of Segregation of races through history. Her work is Subsumed and consumed by history in that her artwork reflects on not only the background of her artwork but of herself as an African American or of African origin and what constitutes her artwork. She talks about Sugar as this thing that on its own has individuality and resonates with culture in some way or form in that, Sugar is naturally grown from sugar Cane, Sugar cane grows in tropical climates and is and has been harvested by slaves, underpaid workers, and maybe even Children. Through this she comes across the term, Sugar Subtlety, This was a sugar sculpture made out of Sugar paste, Marzipan, fruits, and nut that was sculpted to portray royalty. It was mainly consumed by royalty, Nobility, and Members of the clergy. The subtlety provided her the opportunity to make a figure that can embrace many themes that is representative of power in and of itself. The fifteen figures were made out of a substance that was temporal meaning that they were subject to change. The main aim of the piece was not to create a nonsexual caretaker of the city or taken or satisfied or abused. The sculpture is powerful because it upsets expectations one after the other. Kara Walker’s visual production sculptures, cutouts, drawings, and films have been diacritic in tone. But the diary Walker keeps is not explicitly personal; it’s a historical ledger filled with one-line descriptions about all those bodies and psyches that were bought and sold from the seventeenth century on when slavery became the American way of life and its maiming shadows pressed down on black and white souls alike. A quote from Mintz's book:

“Sugar...has been one of the massive demographic forces in world history.' Because of it, literally, millions of enslaved Africans reached the New World...This migration was followed by those of East Indians...Chinese, Portuguese, and many other peoples. ...Sugar brought a dozen different ethnic groups in staggering succession to Hawaii, and sugar still moves people about the Caribbean.”

Another good example is Rachel Dolezal. Not much of a contemporary artist in fact her career was mainly in politics. She is well known in the contemporary world as an American civil rights activist who claimed to be a black woman while being of white-European ancestry while having no known black or African ancestry. Dolezal was the president of “The National Association for Advancement of Coloured People” between 2014 and 2015 where she sub-sequentially resigned after the association believed the claims of her ancestry to be false. She received further public scrutiny when her white parents claimed she was a white woman passing as a black woman. Dolezal however maintained that she was of African ancestry fueled a national debate and her critics claimed she had committed “Cultural Appropriation”. Her defenders on the other hand say that her self-identity claim was genuine even if it was not based on race or ancestry. The question arises, was it fair for her to be dismissed based on her self-proclaimed African ancestry? Personally, I believe that everyone has a right to their own opinion and to their own truth. According to Dolezal, she was of African descent and she had every right to feel that way because it was her truth. The issue at hand was that she applied under the false pretense of actually being a black woman and lied on paper where she had no need to. She chose toile to the association to fulfill her goals, which were not batted but her methodology was completely flawed. In the aftermath of the controversy, Doležal was dismissed from her position as an Instructor in Africana Studies at Eastern Washington University and removed by the Spokane City Council as Chair of the Police Ombudsman Commission over 'a pattern of misconduct.' Dolezal's wild claims of African Ancestry stem from the fact that her parents adopted three African American children and one black Haitian child, she lived in a teepee, the fact that she and her family once lived in South Africa while she was a child as Missionaries while she was a child and that she endured a form of abuse of which we can only imagine based on her claims. Her stories have loopholes in that she twisted the life from her past just enough to sway one's opinion and not too much to be far from the actual truth. In truth, her family did indeed live in South Africa but in a much later period whereby Dolezal was practically an Adult 10 years before she applied for the role of president of the NAACP. Her father did also live briefly in a teepee three years prior to when she was born. Dolezal's reasoning was that because she had lived or experienced life in a home with African ancestry, Who were not related by blood and also were not purely from Africa but African American, she qualified to be a black woman. She felt as though she had met the quota required to be called a black woman if there was one. That is where she was wrong. No amount of hardship can qualify you to be another person entirely. Through all this Dolezal’s relationship with her family continued to dwindle as she was struggling from an identity crisis. She even went as far as changing her appearance in order to look the part of an African woman.

Among the two artists, we see one who embraces their identity and culture and tries to show and educate the world through her art (Kara Walker) where on the other hand the other (Rachel Dolezal) degrades the meaning of identity and culture to mere experience. One supports culture and tries to embrace and better themselves and society while the other completely misunderstands what culture and identity entail.

Another Artist worthy of mention is Owkui Enwezor. Enwezor was raised in Enugu in eastern Nigeria. In the early 1980s, he relocated to the United States to attend Jersey City State College (now New Jersey City University), where he earned a B.A. in political science. His foray into the art world began as an observer. At various exhibits, Enwezor noticed the absence of artists from Africa and started critiquing the shows. He began writing widely for art magazines and even launched one of his own—Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, founded in 1994 and published in concert with the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. He believes that contemporary works of art should aspire to bring to life an idea, objects that need the consumer to bring Agency. Agency is a prerequisite if we are considering African art and its differences to bridge them and exploit the differences as a mechanism of invention and going beyond one’s own dead certainties. To collaborate is to give something up in exchange of getting something back. He believes that one of the things as an African is the search for authenticity and cultural acceptance. He believes we should be able to challenge our own authenticity and ability to collaborate and thus uniting us one. He believes that through this collaboration we can bridge the gap that segregation and cultural appropriation has created and believes that Africans and people of African ancestry hold the future in their hand because he says it’s already happened to everyone else and he feels that it is the African age of evolution. He believes as a curator his aim is not to be a tastemaker but to produce knowledge. He spoke to the emergence of globalism and to important themes such as gender and race relations, ethnic and social conflicts political instability, and social unrest. In the Exhibition “The Work of Yinka Shonibare” Okwui Enwezor was intrigued by the African Fabric theme at the Barbican Gallery in London because it was a detonated category within the 20th-century culture that highlights the transcultural nature of modernity, in which in relation to Africa all too quickly disappears into the forest of signs through which Africa signifies itself to the western eye. He found the placement of certain pieces of art quite intriguing because they folded and backed into each other while others were placed ironically to both illustrate a point and perhaps to propose new meaning to the artwork. The suggestiveness of the work however made the subversive nature of discourse. What attracted him more to the artwork was not singularly the exquisite tailoring but the way the artwork collapsed two realms breaking down the usual binaries of postmodern turn in culture. A culture which at that point was burning out its tapers.

References & Bibliography

1. Sweetness and power- The place of sugar in modern History-Sidney W. Mintz.
2. 'Because the truth matters'. CDA Press. June 12, 2015
3. Moyer, Justin Wm. (June 12, 2015). ''Are you an African American?' Why an NAACP official isn't saying'. The Washington Post. Retrieved June 13, 2015
4. https://art21.org/artist/kara-walker/
5. Varinsky, Dana (9 May 2014). 'Domino Factory Art Exhibition to Open Days Before Final Council Vote'. DNAInfo. Archived from the original on 31 December 2015. Retrieved 28 April 2017
6. Herman, Alison (14 October 2014). 'Kara Walker Knew People Would Take Dumb Selfies With 'A Subtlety,' and That Shouldn't Surprise Us'. Flavorwire. Retrieved 30 April 2017
7. http://racheldolezal.blogspot.com/
8. Mercedes Lara, Maria (November 2, 2015). 'Rachel Dolezal Admits She Was 'Biologically Born White' but Maintains That She Identifies as Black'. People. Retrieved November 2, 2015
9. Okwui Enwezor, 'Tricking the Mind: The Work of Yinka Shonibare' taken from: Hassan & Oguibe (eds.) Authentic/Ex-Centric: Conceptualism in Contemporary African Art, Prins Claus Fondi, 2002