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Second Careers: Two Tributaries in African Art <\/span><\/i>connected canonical works from western and central Africa to works from contemporary artists active in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and Mozambique, whose use of repurposed materials echoes practices of the past.1<\/span><\/sup><\/span> As its title implied, the exhibition introduced dual themes, one that considered the \u201csecond careers\u201d of artworks\u2014as both museum objects and foundational inspiration to succeeding generations of artists\u2014and one that demonstrated how contemporary artists give salvaged materials new \u201clives\u201d as art. The exhibition posed the questions: What will the \u201csecond careers\u201d of twenty-first-century African artworks be, and what conversations will they inspire after entering museum collections?<\/span><\/p>\n Planned and executed by Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi (now the Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York), <\/span>Second Careers <\/span><\/i>examined nine historical African artworks from the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), Emory University\u2019s Michael C. Carlos Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum, alongside the art of six contemporary practitioners representing different generations: El Anatsui, Tahir Carl Karmali, Gon\u00e7alo Mabunda, Nnenna Okore, Zohra Opoku, and Elias Sime. The ambitious exhibition was further distilled through three \u201clenses\u201d\u2014memory, materiality, and transformation\u2014which Nzewi attempted to universally apply to all the works in <\/span>Second Careers<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n Considering this conceptual framing, and the spatially challenging Julia and Larry Pollock Focus Gallery in which <\/span>Second Careers<\/span><\/i> was displayed, the exhibition carried substantial thematic and visual demands, with intermittent levels of success.2<\/span><\/sup><\/span> Large-scale works by Anatsui, Okore, and Sime dominated two walls. Babanki, Baule, Chokwe, Kuba, Malinke, Songye, and Yoruba cultures were represented through compelling masks, figures, and garments, but offered up without much context to each other (geographically or thematically) and with weak interconnection to the contemporary pieces. Zohra Opoku\u2019s <\/span>Nana Opoku Gyabbah II, Chidomhene of Asato\/Akan <\/span><\/i>was arguably the sole piece capable of being viewed through all three \u201clenses\u201d: the artist recalled \u201ctraditional concepts of the past\u201d through repeated screen-printed symbols and images of her late father in his kente-cloth wrapper (memory lens), chose \u201cmaterials . . . imbued with meaning\u201d in terms of Ghanaian industry and identity (materiality lens), and transformed her signature medium\u2014textile\u2014in an innovative way, as a personal tribute to her ancestors (transformation lens) (fig. 2).<\/span><\/p>\n The same could not be said for all exhibition items, which, cumulatively, created an adverse effect and undermined the premise of the show. The majority of the contemporary works in <\/span>Second Careers<\/span><\/i>\u00a0evidenced no direct inspiration from the historical items. The exhibition excelled in its arguments for the \u201csecond careers\u201d of museum objects: Most of the historical items were created for and used in spiritual and ceremonial contexts, but, bereft of their intended purposes, play an established role as beautiful artworks. The exhibition was not particularly strengthened by the Ndeemba mask, and the Kuba prestige belt evidenced great craftsmanship, but these and other smaller historical works felt squeezed into the space.<\/span><\/p>\n Tahir Carl Karmali\u2019s <\/span>Jua Kali<\/span><\/i> photo-composite portraits depict Nairobians as cyber-steampunk deities, created to \u201clook as if one adorned themselves with found objects, which somehow work together to make them superhuman\u201d3<\/span><\/sup><\/span> (fig. 3). Here again, the connection with historical objects was flimsy: Curatorial perspective viewed the portraits as linear descendants of items like the nearby Songye power figure,4<\/span><\/sup><\/span> but Karmali\u2019s own artist\u2019s statement emphasized that his series was \u201cinspired by the informal sector [referred to by the term \u2018jua kali,\u2019 Kiswahili for \u2018fierce sun\u2019] that breathes character into Nairobi\u2019s economy,\u201d and aimed to change perceptions of Jua Kali workers.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Was the Malinke hunter\u2019s shirt, with its leather pouches filled with Islamic scripts, inspiration to Elias Sime\u2019s <\/span>Tightrope: Non-Essential Speed<\/span><\/i> (figs. 4, 5)? In gallery labels, Nzewi suggested that Sime\u2019s small plastic telephone wire connectors \u201crecall[ed]\u201d the shirt\u2019s leather pouches, but in the catalogue, the curator acknowledged such a suggestion \u201cmay seem a stretch.\u201d5<\/span><\/sup><\/span> And, indeed, it did seem a stretch, and the acknowledgement only a hollow justification for a comparison that added little to the visitor\u2019s understanding of either object. Sime\u2019s masterful collage of accumulated electronic materials did not need this linkage to stand on its own: Repurposed materials created an arresting artwork, one that also served as a meditation on environmental waste and the aftereffects of colonialism.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"\/sequitur\/files\/2021\/05\/DF_Fig-2-307x636.png\")
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