The Ghanaian-born sculptor El Anatsui (b. 1944) is one of the most significant artistic innovators of our time, merging personal, local, and global concerns in his visual creations. By weaving together discarded aluminum tops from Nigerian liquor bottles, Anatsui creates large-scale sculptures called gawu ("metal" or "fashioned cloth" in Anatsui's native language) that demonstrate a fascinating interplay of color, shape, and fluidity. 
In an illustrated essay, Alisa LaGamma provides a brief history of El Anatsui's career and an analysis of his practice. The catalogue also includes a never-before-published conversation between noted artist and curator Chika Okeke-Agulu and Anatsui, as they discuss the themes of history, economy, sustainability, and identity explored within Anatsui's work. Dramatic photographs of the installations at the Clark provide a unique look at these immersive sculptures, including Intermittent Signals (2009) and Delta (2010), in the contemplative spaces of Stone Hill Center.

El Anatsui at the Clark

Arts & Photography

Okeke-Agulu, Chika

History & Criticism

Clark Art Institute

Written by one of the foremost scholars of African art and featuring 129 color images, Postcolonial Modernism chronicles the emergence of artistic modernism in Nigeria in the heady years surrounding political independence in 1960, before the outbreak of civil war in 1967. Chika Okeke-Agulu traces the artistic, intellectual, and critical networks in several Nigerian cities. Zaria is particularly important, because it was there, at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, that a group of students formed the Art Society and inaugurated postcolonial modernism in Nigeria. As Okeke-Agulu explains, their works show both a deep connection with local artistic traditions and the stylistic sophistication that we have come to associate with twentieth-century modernist practices. He explores how these young Nigerian artists were inspired by the rhetoric and ideologies of decolonization and nationalism in the early- and mid-twentieth century and, later, by advocates of negritude and pan-Africanism. They translated the experiences of decolonization into a distinctive "postcolonial modernism" that has continued to inform the work of major Nigerian artists.

Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria

Duke University Press Books

The first monograph on the work of celebrated and influential Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu Wangechi Mutu's remarkable body of work touches on such issues as sexuality, ecology, politics, and the rhythms and chaos that govern the world.&nbsp;Her paintings, sculptures, and collages, often enriched with culturally-charged materials including tea, synthetic hair, Kenyan soil, feathers, and sand, interweave fact with fiction, generating a unique form of myth-making that sets her apart from classical history or popular culture. This is the first book to document her evolution and explore her impact.

Wangechi Mutu (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Jones, Kellie

Edwards, Adrienne

Martin, Courtney J.

Humor & Entertainment

Phaidon Press

Product Description 
A groundbreaking A-Z survey of the work of over 300 modern and contemporary artists born or based in Africa 
Modern and Contemporary African art is at the forefront of the current curatorial and collector movement in today’s art scene. This groundbreaking new book, created in collaboration with a prestigious global advisory board, represents the most substantial appraisal of contemporary artists born or based in Africa available. Features the work of more than 300 artists, including El Anatsui, Marlene Dumas, David Goldblatt, Lubaina Himid, William Kentridge, Julie Mehretu, Wangechi Mutu, and Robin Rhode, as well as lesser-known names from across Africa, with stunning and surprising examples of their art paired with insightful texts that demonstrate their contribution to the painting, sculpture, installation, photography, moving image, and performance art. 
Advisory Panel: Alayo Akinkugbe, Kavita Chellaram, Raphael Chikukwa, Julie Crooks, Tandazani Dhlakama, Oumy Diaw, Janine Gaëlle Dieudji, Ekow Eshun, Ndubuisi C. Ezeluomba, Joseph Gergel, Danda Jaroljmek, Omar Kholeif, Rose Jepkorir Kiptum, Alicia Knock, Nkule Mabaso, Lucy MacGarry, Owen Martin, Aude Christel Mgba, Bongani Mkhonza, Riason Naidoo, Paula Nascimento, Simon Njami, Robert Njathika, Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Hannah O’Leary, Sean O’Toole, John Owoo, Brenda Schmahmann, Mark Sealy, Yasmeen Siddiqui, and Joseph L. Underwood 
 Review 
"African Artists moves toward filling the hole in the Western record of the continent’s creative output." – New York Times, Holiday Gift Guide\n“A comprehensive guide to the continent’s brightest stars” – 
ARTnews\n“The volume comes at a time when modern and contemporary African art is at the forefront of curatorial and collector efforts.” – 
SixtySix Mag\n“This volume makes a strong argument for the diverse mediums and messages coming out of the African continent.” – 
Elle Decor\n“Essential” – Aesthetica 
“A groundbreaking new book” – Red 
 About the Author 
Conceived and edited by Phaidon editors. 
Chika Okeke-Agulu is Professor of African and African Diaspora Art at Princeton University. He is the author of several books including Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria (2015), and is a co-editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. 
Joseph L. Underwood is a scholar and curator whose research addresses the transnational networks of modern and contemporary African art, with an emphasis on artists from Senegal.

African Artists: From 1882 to Now

Editors, Phaidon

Underwood, Joseph L.

AUTOPORTRAIT is the first comprehensive survey of Samuel Fosso's multifaceted oeuvre. Since the mid-1970s, the artist has focused on self-portraiture and performance, envisioning variations of identity in the postcolonial era. From Fosso's early self-portraits in black-and-white from the 1970s to his recent, continually inventive exercises in self-presentation, highlights include the vibrant series "Tati" (1997), in which he playfully inhabits African and African American characters and archetypes; and the magisterial portraits of "African Spirits" (2008), where he poses as icons of the pan-African liberation and Civil Rights movements, such as Angela Davis, Martin Luther King, Jr., Patrice Lumumba and Nelson Mandela.This landmark monograph demonstrates Fosso's unique departure from the traditions of West African studio photography, established in the 1950s and '60s by modern masters Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé. By charting his conceptual practice of self-portraiture, and sustained engagement with notions of sexuality, gender and self-representation, this book reveals an unprecedented photographic project-one that consistently reflects themes in global visual culture, and covers the range of expressive applications of photography.Taking pictures is for me a way of liberating myself from the suffering of childhood, from illness, war, everything. I always believed that my life would be pushed aside by other people's, but photography has given me a second life. It's made all lives possible for me. - Samuel Fosso

Samuel Fosso: Autoportrait

Smith, Terry

Bajac, Quentin

Patras, Jean-Marc

Onabanjo, Oluremi

Photography & Video

Steidl/The Walther Collection, New York

High quality images selected from the the US-based Nigerian artist' sketch books dating from 1963 to the present.
This book is a critical study of the drawings of influential Nigerian artist and poet Obiora Udechukwu. It argues, quite compellingly, that the radical fusion of lyrical formalism and socio-political critique in Udechukwu’s drawings is a direct outcome of his lifelong commitment to the graphic, pictorial and rhetorical properties of line. From drawings of war and famine he made as a young man in Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970) to the sophisticated abstract compositions of the past two decades, Udechukwu has systematically eliminated the boundaries between image and text, literary and visual poetry, and the results are drawings of tremendous lyrical power. Featuring more than 500 drawings, many in color, this beautifully designed book provides an unprecedented account of drawing as an ideational tool and powerful vehicle for the expression of an artistic-poetic imagination. Authored by an award-winning, internationally recognized art historian and critic, this book is a fitting homage to the originality of Udechukwu’s drawings and illustrious career.

Obiora Udechukwu: Line, Image, Text

Skira

This is the first scholarly monograph and most comprehensive documentation to date of the work of Yusuf Grillo (b. 1934) the influential Nigerian modernist painter, inaugural president of the Society of Nigerian Artists and founding director of School of Art, Design and Printing at the famous Yaba College of Technology, Lagos.\nWritten by Chika Okeke-Agulu, the award-winning art historian and critic, and profusely illustrated in full colour, this book provides an unprecedented historical overview and critical examination of the Grillo’s place within the history of 20th-century Nigerian art. Through persuasive reading of the artist’s work, it argues that Grillo is incomparable among his peers in his vigorous, career-long engagement with the problem of colour and painting.\nFor a member of the legendary Art Society, the group of young artists who at the dawn of political independence in the late 1950s and early 1960s, called for the decolonization of the art academy and establishment of national culture, Grillo’s steadfast, painterly formalism is remarkable. His insistence on artistic sincerity, which for him meant locating painting’s worth and significance in the relentless need to resolve the always-changing problems posed by colour, rather than in its ideological and cultural signification, exemplifies a pertinent vision and critical stance within the discourse and history of postcolonial modernism in Africa.\nGrillo’s lifelong meditation on the blue palette is thus not so much an expression of his Yoruba cultural identity, as informed by his vision of painting as a longue-durée process and inquiry on specific problems of colour, its application, materiality, optics and affect. Colour for Grillo, the book argues, serves as a structuring device that allows him to make sense of and navigate the complex terrains of the phenomenal and metaphysical worlds. From the vantage of a single colour, Grillo imagines a painterly cosmos that is at once coherent and idiosyncratic, stable and dynamic; a world that can be instantaneously apprehended because it originates or revolves around a single colour system, yet impossible to comprehend because it stretches infinitely the possibilities of the monochromatic register. This explains why his exploration of the blue palette, without any vaunted, and indeed confining, ideological motivation or cultural imperative, continues to sustain his and our interest several decades on.

YUSUF GRILLO: BOUND TO COLOUR /ANGLAIS

Individual Artists

The product of more than 30 years of research, this astounding and authoritative volume reveals the political metaphors underpinning El Anatsui's magnificent abstract sculpture Authored by two acclaimed scholars, Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu, this is the most comprehensive and authoritative account yet on the work of El Anatsui, the world-renowned Ghanaian-born sculptor. The product of more than three decades of research and close collaboration with the artist, it shows how his early wood reliefs and terracottas, and the later monumental metal sculptures, express a search for alternative models of art-making. The authors argue that the pervasiveness of fragmentation as a compositional device in Anatsui's oeuvre evokes the impact of colonization and postcolonial forces on African cultures. At the same time, the invocation of resilience and fragility invests his shape-shifting sculptures with iconic power. The authors also show how, in his critically acclaimed metal works, the manual labor of flattening, cutting, twisting and crushing bottle caps and using copper wires to suture and stitch the elements into one dazzling, reconfigurable epic piece serves as a powerful metaphor for human life. This book presents Anatsui as a visionary of incomparable imagination, also situating his work within a broader historical context--specifically, the postcolonial modernism of midcentury African artists and writers, the cultural ferment of post-independence Ghana and the intellectual environment of the 1970s Nsukka School. By recovering these histories, the authors show how and why Anatsui became one of the most formidable sculptors of our time. Born in Anyako, Ghana, in 1944, El Anatsui is widely regarded as the greatest living African artist. He has received the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Biennale (2015), the Praemium Imperiale Award for Sculpture (2017) and the Lorenzo il Magnifico Lifetime Achievement Award (2017). His works are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern; and the National Gallery of Modern Art, Lagos, among others.

El Anatsui: The Reinvention of Sculpture

ENWEZOR, Okwui

Damiani

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