Landmark Exhibition of African Art Comes to Grey Art Gallery

By Richard Pierce

NYU’s Grey Art Gallery has opened a landmark exhibition of some 60 contemporary paintings, sculptures, videos, and photographs alongside a selection of mid-20th century and recent African textiles by 16 artists living in Africa and abroad.  Entitled “The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles / Recent Art,” the exhibition juxtaposes contemporary African artworks with the textile traditions that inform them.  This is the first exhibition of its kind to show the relationship between older and more recent types of African artistic expression while drawing attention to African textile traditions that have too often been overshadowed by classical African sculpture.
    “In presenting a broad range of media and artistic approaches, the exhibition demonstrates how a number of African artists—coming from different nations and cultural milieus—share a common engagement with one of the most fundamental forms of African expression,” said curator Lynn Gumpert, director of the Grey Art Gallery.
    Gumpert noted that the exhibition focuses on major West African textile traditions including Ghanaian kente and adinkra, Malian hunter’s tunics, factory produced “fancy” and “wax” prints, indigo-dyed fabrics, and Nigerian Igbo wrappers borrowed from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, and from private collections.
    “The Poetics of Cloth,” on view through Dec. 6, is accompanied by a 112-page catalogue with 48 color illustrations. A series of public programs has been organized by the Grey Art Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a parallel exhibition, “The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End,” is simultaneously on view in the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing of the Metropolitan through March 22.
    Visit www.nyu.edu/greyart for a complete list of programs and gallery talks.