No Such Place: A New Exhibition In NYC Asks "What is African Art?"

All images provided by Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art

NO SUCH PLACE: Contemporary African Artists in America is a new group exhibition at New York City's Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art featuring contemporary African artists currently living and working in the United States. The show pushes back against lazy categorizations of "African art" as a homogenous genre by examining the work of eight artists within the context of art-making in the diaspora. The works in the exhibition address the fluidity of each artist's identity, and their output serves as a conduit for representing their "Africaness" in addition to their individual points of view and the varied influences that shape their work.

No Such Place was organized by Larry Ossei-Mensah and Dexter Wimberly, independent art curators from Ghana and New York respectively whose own differing origins and experiences in the art world speak to the issues of cross-cultural identity and global artistic intersections examined in the presentation. For the ongoing show, Ossei-Mensah and Wimberly sought out the magical realist drawings of British-Nigerian artist ruby onyinyechi amanze, the poetic installations of Kenyan-Indian visual artist Brendan Fernandes, Senegalese multidisciplinary artist Modou Dieng's mixed-media meditations on race, class, gender and belonging, South African painter Vivienne Koorland's large-scale hand hewn paintings which explore history and collective memory, and Nigerian-American sculptor Adejoke Tugbiyele's fanciful found object figurines. New work from Egyptian visual artist Sherin Guirguis, Nigerian performance artist Wura-Natasha Ogunji, and Ghanaian-American sculptor and painter Derek Fordjour also round out the multiple perspectives represented.

'NO SUCH PLACE: Contemporary African Artists in America is on view at Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art (37 West 57th St) in New York through April 3rd.