Africa’s No 1 Arts Bookstore and Publisher

One of the greatest art shows I’ve seen since the retrospective on Matisse in D.C. It is called Africa Remix, on display at the Mori Gallery in Mori’s Roppongi Hills. It is a gallery on the 52nd floor of a tower with a 360 degree vista of Tokyo (the vista is on the 51st floor).

The vista was new to me and spectacular. Worth every penny of the $15 admission to both floors. The Africa Remix show would have been worth many times that　by itself, had I known. I, of course, bought the catalogue.

This incredible collection will not be shown in the U.S. That is a tragedy on a world class scale. Come to Tokyo to see it or go to Stockholm in the winter.

First the negative….

First the negative. Racism. In order to include white artists from several black countries the compromise was to also include Africa north of the Sahara. That is as incongruous as including Inuit in a show focused on Guatamalan and Peruvian art. Most of the North African art was sterile, politically offensive and has no relation to art or culture south of the Sahara.

Nevertheless there was one piece that stood out by an Algerian, Zoulika Bouabdellah a short patriotic (French) video piece. It was exciting and imaginative. Camera aimed at the belly button of a belly dancer doing the Marseilles.

The rest of the art took up more space than I know to exist in any American museum, a dozen whole rooms dedicated to a single artist.

If Americans could see the work of El Anatsui, Allan deSouza, or Yinka Shonebari the whole country would be stunned. Africa is the source, a cultural wellspring that the rest of the world has never appreciated and can not fathom.

American experience with African-Americans is a sham. No other American group is as ignorant of their history as American blacks nor as ashamed. All of that is unwarranted.

I did the core research on African economic history for the main text on the subject as a grad student at Berkeley in 1961. I read or scanned every document on Africa written before 1900. (Less than 250 works and maps.)

I gave one lecture on the subject of Africa at the Commonwealth Club and never talked about it again. Nobody, but nobody, knew anything about the history or culture of Africa. I was wasting my time. Most of the cultural, historic and social material on Africa, even today, is somewhere between uncomprehending and irrelevant. It is not my job to fix that but this art show is a start.