VICTOR EKPUK’s Artist Talk at UMUC Sunday, 24 Feb 2013 from 3-5pm

Don’t miss this exciting 4 month exhibition (February 12-May 12, 2013) titled Diaspora Dialogue: Art of Kawbena Ampofo-Anti, Alexander Boghassian and Victor Ekpuk at UMUC (University of Maryland University College)!

Bicycle Song, 17.5″x12″, acrylic & ink on paper

Location:

UMUC, 3501 University Boulevard East, Adelphi, Maryland

Artist Reception & Discussion: Sunday 24, February, 2013. 3:00PM-5:00PM

“Ethiopian painter Skunder Boghossian (1937-2003) is exemplary of African modernism’s Pan-Africanist ideological ambitions, its multilayered signification on diverse ancient and modern African, European, Arab and New World artistic and cultural traditions”. … – Chika Okeke-Agulu.

“Ghanian born, Ampofo-Anti’s sculptures are insistently architectonic, with each of them assuming the form of a mysterious tower or monument. But even as they seem to be products of a pure architectural fantasy, they also bear telling marks—in both their form and subject matter—of the artist’s capacious meditation on architectural models from Africa and the Americas”. – Chika Okeke-Agulu

“Nigerian artist Victor Ekpuk tests the limits of this afro-modernist heritage, even as it shows new possibilities of afrological aesthetics in the age of globalization. Ekpuk, like bebop artists in the United States, developed an improvisatory aesthetics but the motivations for this were different.         Where the formal tactics of bebop derives in part from the longstanding strive to forge a black art and culture from the European, African, Native American cultures brought into intense proximity by transcontinental migration, colonization, and slavery, Ekpuk’s script-based paintings and drawing-performances inspired by nsibidi ideographic forms from southeastern Nigeria anchors him to a specific historical and symbolic place and thus allows him to differentiate his work from a myriad of other similar conceptual and formal practices in the globalized, contemporary art world.” – Chika Okeke-Agulu.

“If there is anything the art of Boghossian, Ampofo-Anti, and Ekpuk tells us, it is that works of art reflect the complex, multiple consciousness and diversely constituted identities of the artists. It inevitably compels us to ponder anew that memorable question posed nearly a century ago by Countee Cullen, the Harlem Renaissance poet: “What is Africa to me?” To the extent that their individual responses are inscribed in their art, it is safe to say that as with their African American counterparts past and present, Africa remains for its artists a site of powerful imaginaries, a historical place to which they are bound by ancestry, and an idea that elicits powerful aesthetic and symbolic action”. – Chika Okeke-Agulu

Full color catalogue with essay by Chika Okeke-Agulu, MFA, PhD Dept. of Art & Archaeology / Center for African American Studies Princeton University