Nigeria art industry loses a pivotal curator of contemporary art, Okwui Enwezor

Omokanye Philip

One of the top noble Nigerian pivot Curator of contemporary art Okwui Enwezor, whose incisive, free-thinking, and ambitious exhibitions were essential in pushing the art world to embrace a global view of contemporary art and art history, has died at the age of 55.

Enwezor breathed his last on the 15th of March, 2019. This happened as a result of his Cancer disease he had been battling with over the years.

He was a Nigerian curator, art critic, writer, poet, and educator, specializing in art history. He lived in New York City and Munich. In 2014, he was ranked 24 in the Art Review list of the 100 most powerful people of the art world.

He was born as the youngest son of an affluent Igbo family, in Awkuzu, Calabar,Cross Rivers State, Nigeria in 1963. He started his university in 1982, during which after a semester at the University of Nigeria, moved to the Bronx at the age of 18. He became certified in Bachelor of Arts degree in political sciences at the New Jersey City University in 1987.

When Enwezor graduated, he moved downtown and took up poetry. He performed at the Knitting Factory and the Nuyorican Poets Café in the East Village. Enwezor’s study of poetry introduced him to language-based art forms like Conceptual Art to art criticism. He launched the triannual Nka

Journal of Contemporary African Art from his Brooklyn apartment in conjunction with Chika Okeke-Agulu and Salah Hassan Teaming up in 1993.

Enwezor had his breakthrough in 1996 as a curator of In/sight, an exhibit of 30 African photographers at the Guggenheim Museum after putting on a couple of small museum shows. In/sight was one of the first shows anywhere to put contemporary art from Africa in the historical and political context of colonial withdrawal and the emergence of independent African states.

Enwezor was the first African-born curator to organize the Biennale, a show established in 1895, and the first non-European to oversee Documenta, the every-five-years exhibition in Kassel, Germany, which he organized in 2002. That latter show, Documenta XI, defined his curatorial sensibility: venturesome, unabashedly intellectual, and intent on rethinking how institutions operate.

Enwezor presented what he termed platforms—conferences, seminars, and other projects—in Berlin, Vienna, New Delhi, St. Lucia, and Lagos, Nigeria, and for the main exhibition he showcased artists from beyond Europe and the United States, which had historically dominated the affair in the run-up to the opening of Documenta in June of 2002.

His career during a discussion with Melissa Chiu at the Asia Society in New York in 2014, he said, “When I started, I always had what I thought was a change agenda.” He worked tirelessly over the course of more than 30 years to fulfill that mission, shaping, indelibly, the way art is presented and taught.

“He was one of the leaders of, let’s call it, the free curatorial world, one of the people who believed in intelligence and scholarly research and passion and the power of the curatorial,” Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the director of the Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Italy, and curator of Documenta 13 in 2012, said by phone this morning.

Curator Cuauhtémoc Medina twitted Enwezor that he “was a major force of contemporary culture. His achievement as curator of some of the most important global exhibitions of the last decade punctuated the emergence of the South as a global cultural movement.”

Asked about that name in an interview with the Vitra Design Museum, Enwezor said he was “searching for a term that projected an aesthetic horizon, but would also constitute a forum of ideological resistance.” He explained that Nka, “in Igbo, the language I grew up with in Eastern Nigeria, means to create, to make, to invent. It also means art. Then in Basaa, a language in Cameroon, Nka means discourse. People oftentimes ask me, ‘When was the first time you went to a museum?’ As if a museum is the only space where one encounters art! Calling the magazine Nka was a way of disarming this particular notion.”

In 1996, Enwezor organized “In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present” at the Guggenheim Museum’s location in the SoHo section of Manhattan, featuring 30 artists, including canonical figures like Seydou Keïta, of Mali, and Samuel Fosso, of Nigeria. Max Kozloff, writing in Artforum, said that the show “broke ground here, offering practically all its subjects a U.S. debut” and Holland Cotter, in the New York Times, termed it a “mandatory stop.”

Enwezor served on numerous juries, advisory bodies, and curatorial teams including: the advisory team of Carnegie International in 1999; Venice Biennale; Hugo Boss Prize, Guggenheim Museum; Foto Press, Barcelona; Carnegie Prize; International Center for Photography Infinity Awards; Visible Award; Young Palestinian Artist Award, Ramallah; and the Cairo, Istanbul, Sharjah, and Shanghai Biennales. In 2004 he headed the jury for the Artes Mundi prize, an art award created to stimulate interest in contemporary art in Wales. In 2012, he chaired the jury for Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics.

Between 2005 to 2009, Enwezor was Dean of Academic Affairs and Senior Vice President at San Francisco Art Institute. He held positions as Visiting Professor in art history at University of Pittsburgh; Columbia University, New York; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and University of Umea, Sweden. In the Spring of 2012, he served as the Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Professor at Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

As a writer, critic, and editor, Enwezor was a regular contributor to numerous exhibition catalogues, anthologies, and journals. He was

the founding editor and publisher of the critical art journal NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art established in 1994, and currently published by Duke University Press.

His writings have appeared in numerous journals, catalogues, books, and magazines including: Third Text, Texte zur Kunst, Parkett, Artforum, Frieze, Art Journal, Research in African Literatures, Engage, Glendora, Atlantica just to mention a few. In 2008, the German magazine 032c published a somewhat controversial interview with Enwezor, conducted by German novelist Joachim Bessing

Among his books are Contemporary African Art Since 1980 (Bologna: Damiani, 2009) co-authored with Chika Okeke-Agulu, Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), Reading the Contemporary: African Art, from Theory to the Marketplace (MIT Press, Cambridge and INIVA, London) and Mega Exhibitions: Antinomies of a Transnational Global Form (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich), Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, and The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society. He is also the editor of a four-volume publication of Documenta 11 Platforms: Democracy Unrealized; Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice and the Processes of Truth and Reconciliation; Creolité and Creolization; Under Siege: Four African Cities, Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos (Hatje Cantz, Verlag, Stuttgart).

In 2006, Enwezor received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism from the College Art Association Enwezor was ranked 42 in ArtReview′s guide to the 100 most powerful figures in contemporary art: Power 100, 2010.

Okwui Enwezor died on 15 March 2019 at the age of 55