Asking for Eyes: The Visual Voice of Southeast Africa: Selections from the Sana Foundation

African Arts, Spring, 2006 by Barbara W. Blackmun

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The Global Sphere barely suggested the dynamic popular culture that is currently evident in post-apartheid South Africa. Nevertheless, creative energy resonated throughout the exhibition's presentation of fluid, interlocking, and developing spheres of human life. Mentally, the viewer returned full circle through the spheres, to the powerful and disquieting contemporary sculptures in the introductory gallery. Here again was the wall text reminder that the significance of any work of art constantly varies, in relation to each individual who contemplates it. In an exhibition of African art, it was especially refreshing to encounter emphases on the flux of continual change and on the centrality of unique personhood.

"Asking for Eyes" will be on exhibition at the William D. Cannon Art Gallery from April 23-July 9, 2006, and additional venues are also being considered. The exhibition was initiated and coordinated by art historian Teri Sowell at San Diego State University, whose students of African art were given the opportunity to enroll in her Curatorial Practices seminar, in order to develop a unique exhibition. Nineteen undergraduate and graduate students volunteered to manage all aspects of the exhibition's development, research, fundraising, installation and graphic design, marketing, education, and community outreach, including the publication of the handsome illustrated 109-page catalogue, with 6 essays, 117 illustrations in color, collection list, and bibliography.

The catalogue is available for $20.00 plus shipping from artsfoundation@hotmail.com, or call 760-737-2903.