Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Conspiracy of modern art

By Kendall Gill


The sad thing is that our so-called elites gallery owners do not get it too. In most cases they are worst and very ignorant and naive about African art. How long are we going to allow these false monsters of the past run wild in our present time? I have realized that truth is usually a hard pill to swallow but we must confront our past for a better tomorrow. I have been turned down several times by some ignorant gallery owners on both sides of the fence for their lack of interest in African Art. In their words African Art is primitive.

Maybe I am missing something; please tell me the expectation of an educator who thought the grand children of Amina in Nigeria, that River Niger was discovered by Mongo Park. We have been forced to look down on ourselves. They held our minds captive with the television, print media, history books or documentaries of their explorers that were written supposedly for them, but ended up in our nation's schools bookshelves for mind alteration and economic exploitation.

The same River Niger, where their grand ma, Anina bath, swam, fetched water, they have known and played in the river all their lives and in fact the legend had it that their grandpa Obi was among the men that guided and guarded the strange White man from the wild beast of the jungle. Instead of a letter of appreciation, their great grand children are forced and feed lies of the incident in the name of education.

Obviously including them in their modern era will mean making them equal with their counterparts in Europe. You know what that means to black man who was supposed to be picking cottons. European modern art was the biggest scam on African Art. They took the best of our forefathers and kicked us to the trash. During the era of European avant-garde artists, there were prolific African Artists such as Aina Onabolu and many others whose works were never considered modern.

I have walked into a financial firm in Atlanta, owned and managed by some Nigerians and the issue of African Art came up, One of the owners was asked what type of art do have hanging on your wall. You need see him go off with pride and talked eloquently on modern art at the end he declared that he doesn't want to be associated with African Art. They knew what they were doing and the effect of these centuries of bad seeds is what we see today in Africa and beyond. It is very common to see African professionals, highly educated but with no knowledge of self and very much whiter than the white, if you know what I mean




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