By Ogova Ondego
Published December 6, 2019
Contemporary Kenyan art is as diverse as the individual artists that make up this classification. There is no one group, per se, but art that has emerged individually. Some scholars even go so far as to say that the art scene in Kenya is mainly art for the Western tourist, a commercial activity without material support from the public sector.
This is a quote from EarthHues: an exhibit of Contemporary Art catalogue that displays the work of 16 artists from Kenya, Ethiopia, Ghana and South Africa.
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Besides running brief biographies of the artists whose work is on show, the catalogue of the exhibition also carries brief background information on the countries represented.
“Attempts to define and locate the practice of modern art in Africa,” writes Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, Horovitz Fellow in Art History at Northwestern University, “have proved difficult for much of this century.”
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Why is this so?
Though “Art practices of all types are a vital form of cultural production in Africa. In the 20th century,” Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie contends, “Historical analyses of modern African art tradition are lacking and the critical commentary that engages this sphere of contemporary art practice is very contentious.”
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How so?
“A current controversy in this field relates to the manner in which contemporary African art is presented and received in art exhibitions held outside Africa,” the art historian says. “Critics contend that such exhibitions often select individual African artists to fit preconceived frames of reference in which they are cast either as neo-primitives, or as inspired amateurs.”
Even then, he says that “modern African art has been useful as a location from which to pursue narratives about national identity.”
Food for thought; not so?
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And so EarthHues, an exhibition of contemporary art by Africans that accompanied the launch of a satellite over Africa by a US American telecommunications company called WorldSpace in 1998, came to be a great platform on which to engage on things contemporary African. That debate, that started some 21 years ago, appears to be still raging. And this article appears to be a confirmation of that.
And this was said to have been ‘The first in a series of exhibits” by WorldSpace that said its mission was “to deliver satellite digital direct free-to-air audio and subscription multi-media services providing entertainment, information and education via a new generation of affordable,portable radio receivers to 4 billion listeners in the emerging markets of the world.”
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Noah A Samara, chairman and chief executive officer of WorldSpace, said the aim of the exhibition that ran october – December 1998 in the US American capital, Washington, DC, was ‘to seek out emerging artists from the countries within the WorldSpace global service area and provide audiences in the United States exposure to their work.”
