The Arts of Africa

Gallery Show

Najjar Abdul-Musawwir
Friday, April 15 · 5:00pm - 8:00pm

6200 s Drexel, Harriet Harris Park

Chicago, IL

Najjar Abdul-Musawwir is an internationally acclaimed artist who has exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Africa, Asia and Europe. He currently works as a tenured Associate Professor in the School of Art and Design at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. When he is not creating impressive works of art, or teaching college students; he can be found working with “dis-engaged youth” and their families helping them to discover their creative voices. Najjar’s work for the community is two-fold, it is an important aspect of his faith as a Muslim but also because it allows him to foster in others, what has helped him survive and surpass “assumed” limitations in his own life. To any and all who will listen, Najjar will say- “art saved my life.” Having been a robust artist throughout his childhood, but laying his talents to the wayside in his late teens; he reconnected with his childhood affection in his twenties when he made the decision to pursue an undergraduate and later a Master of Arts degree in Fine Arts at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Artistically Najjar’s style has been described as abstract and abstract expressionism.

His unique eye and canvas manifestations awarded him a coveted artist-in-residence with the N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Arts in Detroit, Michigan in fall of 2009.

Najjar’s academic distinctions include the Rickert Ziebold Trust Award (1992), invited by the MacAuthur Foundation as a member of Illinois artist’s advisement team (1995), and the distinguished Judge William Holmes Cook Endowed Professorship (2009).

African-Americans in Chicago: DuSable to Obama

The Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (Festival panafricain du cinéma et de la télévision de Ouagadougou or FESPACO) will feature the highly awaited documentory from the USA that focuses on the history of Black people in home-town of the first African-American US president Barack Obama.

FESPACO is the largest African film festival, held biennially in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. The festival is the biggest regular cultural event on the African continent and it mostly focuses on the African film and African filmmakers. FESPACO starts two weeks after the last Saturday of February with the opening night in the Stade du 4-Août, which is the national stadium. It is hugely successful.

The festival is for African film industry professionals offering them the chance to establish working relationships, exchange ideas and to promote their work. FESPACO’s stated aim is to “contribute to the expansion and development of African cinema as means of expression, education and awareness-raising”. Since FESPACO’s founding, the festival has attracted visitors from across the continent and beyond.

Producers of African-Americans in Chicago DuSable to Obama Barbara E. Allen and Dan Andries along with writer Gail F. Baker tell stories of men and women whose extraordinary lives changed history. Beginning with Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, who established a trading outpost in the area during the 1780s and is considered the “Father of Chicago,” African Americans have had a long history in Chicago. The documentary covers four distinct periods: from DuSable to the World Columbian Exposition; Post Reconstruction to the Eve of WWII; WWII to the Civil Rights Movement; and Post Civil Rights Movement to the election of President Obama. Within these sections, this compelling documentary reveals the lives of the celebrated and the unsung—from the establishment of the first black community in the 1840s by freedmen and fugitive slaves to the election of the nation’s first black president.

Stories from contemporary Chicagoans will be used to provide a context for examining the city’s rich history and explore the role African Americans played in building this great metropolis. Historians, writers, politicians, entertainers, and entrepreneurs are among those interviewed. Through their unique perspectives, these individuals provide a multi‐faceted view of the contemporary African American community while simultaneously demonstrating its vital influence in shaping a great American city and the entire nation.

Full of colorful personalities and poignant stories, WTTW’s production of DuSable to Obama: Chicago’s Black Metropolis celebrates the past, present, and future of the region’s African American community. By supporting DuSable to Obama: Chicago’s Black Metropolis, you support the enrichment of our beloved city and its people.

FESPACO
http://www.fespaco-bf.net/

Ethiopian painting has made a smooth transition, stylistically and aesthetically, from the religious to the secular. The canvasses are rich in color and alive with movement and crowds, sometimes extraordinary numbers of people, who engage the eye of the viewer with their eyes — even when glancing right or left. It is one of the stylistic hallmarks of Ethiopian painting, the rendering of eyes. The twentieth-century secular painting tradition is also an extraordinary visual record of Amharic history and culture, as is quickly apparent by simply leafing through the pages of this book. Those who read German will be further rewarded by the copious, informative notes on each of the 120 plates of reproduction. The works are from several German and other European museum collections and a few private collections.

These items are all unique pieces and are to be considered primarily artwork sculpture. These items are all unique pieces and are to be considered primarily artwork sculpture. These items are all unique pieces and are to be considered primarily artwork sculpture. These items are all unique pieces and are to be considered primarily artwork sculpture. These items are all unique pieces and are to be considered primarily artwork sculpture. These items are all unique pieces and are to be considered primarily artwork sculpture. These items are all unique pieces and are to be considered primarily artwork sculpture.

HAND-CARVED ETHIOPIAN
CHAIRS & STOOLS
Ethiopia is one of the oldest centers of human existence and the oldest independent nation in Africa. Landlocked between Kenya, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan and Djibouti it covers an area twice the size of France. This country is home to a myriad of peoples with over 80 different spoken languages. Ethiopia’s tremendous role in the origin of humankind and its important place in religious history often overshadow other aspects of the country’s’ identity. Already known for artifacts appreciated for religious connotations and timelines the citizen artisans of Ethiopia are creators, at present, of beautiful, hand crafted items that are personally important to tribal groups and individuals. These items are never produced en masse each with unique designs. and are exceedingly hard to acquire.

October 2009: Students at Peace House Secondary School (PHS) in Tanzania have been working hard to write articles for their first ever STUDENT NEWSLETTER,Peace House Drum. This informative publication details life at PHS and in Tanzania from the perspective of the students and volunteers. Thank you to the students, staff and volunteers at PHS for contributing to Peace House Drum! More articles will be added soon to the Oct/Nov issue. Click here to read PEACE HOUSE DRUM.

READ ABOUT CHANGES AT PEACE HOUSE

African Sand painting

FELA Live – Power Show

Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s afrobeat occupies a pivotal position in Nigeria’s musical continuum and socio-political discourse. Through Fela, a new medium of social and political criticism was unearthed for the critical mass of Nigerians in the 1970s. Although Nigeria was experiencing what would turn out to be a brief respite of oil-boom prosperity after the bitter Biafran civil war, Fela used his music to remind the society to be critical of and cautious about the military dictatorship and the impact of neocolonialism on the psyche of the Nigerian people.

The Senaglese artist Iba Ndiaye, one of the most important painters of 20th-century African modernism, died on Oct. 5 in Paris, where he had lived for many years. He was 80.

The cause was heart failure after a long illness, said Susan Vogel, the founder of the Museum for African Art in New York, which showed Mr. Ndiaye’s work.

Mr. Ndiaye was born in Saint-Louis, Senegal, in 1928, and moved to France in 1949 to study architecture in Montpellier and Paris. He returned to his homeland in 1959. After Senegal gained independence in the 1960, Mr. Ndiaye created a department of plastic arts at the National School of Fine Arts in Dakar, at the request of President Léopold Sédar Senghor. Mr. Ndiaye taught there until 1966, influencing a generation of younger artists, among them Mor Faye.

During this time he helped found, along with Papa Ibra Tall and others, a Senegalese art movement called École de Darkar, which was aligned with the literary movement of Négritude. And in 1966, he organized a large exhibition of Senegalese modernists for the first World Festival of Pan-African Arts in Dakar. While making these formative contributions, however, he also fundamentally disagreed with the primitivist bent in art espoused by many of his École de Dakar colleagues, who believed that new work had to look distinctly non-colonialist to be authentically African.

Although he made many beautiful drawings based on the forms of traditional African masks, Mr. Ndiaye painted in oil on canvas and in a semi-abstract School of Paris style that made little direct reference to African subjects or techniques. His allusions were often to classic Western painters like Goya and Rembrandt, to which he gave a mordant political twist. His 1986 version of Vélazquez’s famous portrait of Juan de Pareja presented its startled-looking black subject under attack by dogs. Much of his work was also influenced by jazz, an art of the African diaspora, in which he had immersed himself in Paris as a young man.

“Certain Europeans, seeking exotic thrills, expect me to serve them folklore,” he said in an interview. “I refuse to do it — otherwise I would exist only as a function of their segregationist ideas of the African artist.” Today, many younger African-born painters like Moshekwa Langa, Odili Donald Odita and Julie Mehretu have followed his lead.

Partly in response to art fashions with which he was uncomfortable, he again left Senegal and returned to Paris to live in 1967. In France, he painted one of his best-known series, “Tabaski.” The images are based on the ritual slaughter of sheep for religious purposes, but are actually about human cruelty and oppression.

His work has appeared in many international exhibitions, including “The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994,” which traveled to Munich, Berlin, Chicago and New York in 2001-02; and “Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art,” organized by Ms. Vogel for the Center for African Art in New York in 1991. In 1987, he had a retrospective in Munich and another in the Hague in 1996. In 2000 he had a career survey in his birthplace, Saint-Louis. A book on his career, “Primitive? Says Who? Iba Ndiaye, Painter Between Continents” by Franz Kaiser and Okwui Enwezor (Adam Biro, Paris), appeared in 2002.

He is survived by his wife of 55 years, Francine Ndiaye, who was for many years in charge of the African collection at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris.

“I need to go back to Paris often,” Mr. Ndiaye said during a period in which he was living in Dakar. “If I remained here I would run the risk of going to sleep. But for inspiration, I need Africa.”