The Cornell Department of History of Art will be hosting Okwui Enwezor, the New York-based, Nigerian art critic and curator, in a presentation that is part of the department's Visual Culture Colloquium series, Monday, Nov. 4.
Enwezor's lecture, titled "The Post-Colonial Constellation: Documenta11 and the New Condition of Critical Practice," will be in Cornell's Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at 5 p.m. It is co-sponsored by the history of art department, the Society for the Humanities and the Johnson Museum.
Born in Nigeria, Enwezor was the artistic director of this year's Documenta11, from June 6 to Sept. 15 in Kassel, Germany, the large, critically acclaimed exhibition of contemporary art. He also was the artistic director of the second Johannesburg Biennale in 1997. Until recently, Enwezor held a position as the adjunct curator of contemporary art at the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the founding editor, with Cornell's Salah Hassan, of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, a critical art journal published by the Africana Studies and Research Center and the Einaudi Center for International Studies.
Enwezor has written extensively on contemporary African art and artists, as well as on the African Diaspora and international art. He organized "The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994" at the Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, which opened in March 2001 and traveled to Berlin, Chicago and New York.
Enwezor was the co-editor of Reading the Contemporary: African Art, From Theory to the Marketplace (Institute for International Visual Arts: INIVA, London and MIT Press, 1999) and a contributor to CREAM: Contemporary Art and Culture (Phaidon Press, London). At present Enwezor is preparing a book, Structural Adjustment, on the practice of contemporary African artists in the 1990s.
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