The Arts of Africa

Founded by Patrick Woodtor, the African Festival of the Arts (AFA) is an annual spectacular celebration of arts and culture from across the African Diaspora. The Festival is hosted each year by Africa International House, Inc.

2011 marks the 22nd anniversary of the Festival as a world-class destination for engaging, family fun. It is the largest neighborhood festival in Chicago, and the largest of its kind in the U.S.

Annually during Labor Day Weekend, the Festival grounds in Chicago’s Washington Park come alive in a simulated African village. Attendees are transported across the Diaspora with interactive demonstrations, vibrant drumming, historical artifacts, colorful and rich fabrics, informative health and wellness workshops, as well fascinating entertainment.

The “Dee Parmer Woodtor Main Stage” (named co-founder and late wife of Patrick Woodtor), has featured explosive performances by legendary entertainers such as James Brown, Hugh Masekela, Roberta Flack, Chaka Khan, Erykah Badu, Angelique Kidjo, Bobby Womack, Gil Scott Heron, Nona Hendryx, Dwele, Goapele, George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic, Slave, Les McCann, Rachelle Ferrell, Kool and the Gang, The Brothers Johnson, and Kindred the Family Soul to name a few.

This year, 2011, Grammy-Award winning artists India Arie and Mary Mary will join the illustrious list of Festival performers.

AFA also boasts a food court rich in delectable and authentic African-cuisine. Experience exotic fare from the diverse cultures of Africa including Egusi from Nigeria; Wolof rice from Senegal; Jerk chicken, goat-meat and fish from the Caribbean; and other spicy, appetizing dishes from across the African Diaspora. And don’t miss out on the distinct Cajun and Soul foods from the different corners of the world.

A preeminent highlight of the Festival is its all-encompassing Fine Arts Pavilion showcasing collectible photography and fine art including original oils, acrylics, watercolors, pastels, charcoal, graphite, and works of limited editions, as well as sculptures in metal, wood, and mixed media. The best artists and works of wearable art and jewelry are also featured in the Fine Arts Pavilion. Notable contemporary visual artists, craft-makers and independent art gallery owners credit the Festival with launching and fortifying their careers.

Importantly, the fine art program continues to educate collectors and beginning collectors on art in general. Dana Easter is this year’s featured artist whose work is showcased on al 2011 Festival materials. Dana Easter will be joined in the Pavilion by Uwa Hunwick, Woodrow Nash, Frank Frazier, Melvin King, Rondell, Stacy Brown, Nii-Oti, Dimali, Isodor Howard and Dayo Laoye, who also serves as the pavilion coordinator.

Festival goers also experience the Book Pavilion where best-selling and emerging authors share their cultural interpretations and the legacy of storytelling in the Griot tradition.

Browse the website pavilion descriptions and programming information.

Information is updated frequently and is subject to change.

2011 African Festival of the Arts Featured Artist is Dana Easter. Dana has grown up in the Festival family since its inception. We are proud of her artistry and her unique wearable arts and fashions. It is with great pride that her art work is featured as the theme piece for this year.

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.”

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.