New spaces for art and artists in Africa

African Arts, Summer, 2009 by Dunja Hersak

Hersak, Dunja. 2008. "Mami Wata: The Slippery Mermaid Phenomenon." In Sacred Waters, Arts for Mami Wata and Other Divinities in Africa and the Diaspora, ed. Henry J. Drewal, pp. 338-48. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Mount, Marshall Ward. 1973. African Art, the Years Since 1920. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Njami, Simon. 2005. "Introduction: Un Autre Monde/ Another World". In Vies Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie. Bamako: Ministere de la Culture du Mali and Afriqueencreation.

Roberts, Allen, and Mary Nooter Roberts. 2006. "Voire la Ville Invisible." Politique Africaine 100:177-97.

Notes

This short paper was presented during Museum Day at the z4th Triennial Symposium on African Art, March 28-April 1, 2007, at the University of Florida, Gainesville.

(1) As Allen Roberts and Mary Nooter Roberts (2006:182-84) have shown, this ecclectic juxtaposion of heroic "messengers" in an "unofficial," personalized re-ordering of social history is also conspicuous in the murals of Pape Samb or "Papisto Boy;' a Senegalese Mouride visionary. Papisto's painting on the walls in the public spaces of Dakar is a devotional act to Sheik Amadou Bamba which emerged with the "Set-Setal" youth movement in the 1980s that sought to deconstruct and reinvent an alternative heritage through its street art.

(2) Poto-Poto is the naine of a suburb in Brazzaville as well as that of an art school begun there by Pierre Lods in 1951 (see Mount 1973:83 89).

DUNIA HERSAK is Associate Professor of African Art History at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles and the Overseas Exhibition Review Editor for African Arts. dvhersak@hotmail.com