African art now : masterpieces from the Jean Pigozzi collection /

This exhibition catalog from the Houston Museum of Fine Arts features Jean Pigozzi's contemporary African art collection, which has been the subject of several exhibitions and publications. This catalog presents 32 artists, most featured in earlier exhibitions. Among the best known are painter Cheri Samba and photographer Seydou Keita. Pigozzi has been somewhat controversial in African art circles because he seeks out untrained African artists whose work represents a "pure" African aesthetic--a preference that seems to perpetuate the exoticism of Africa and African art. This publication acknowledges the debate surrounding Pigozzi and his collection, indirectly through interviews with Pigozzi and directly through an essay by art historian Thomas McEvilley. Two other essays, one on the multimedia installation Clubs of Bamako, the other a reflection on African American responses to contemporary African art, broaden the publication's reach. The body of the catalog consists of lush, large-format photographs of work by each of the artists, accompanied by brief discussions of the artists' oeuvres. In a separate section, artist biographies, exhibition histories, and bibliographies are provided, along with a more general bibliography on contemporary African art. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. General readers; upper-division undergraduates through faculty. V. Rovine University of Florida

The Contemporary African Art Collection?which is essentially run by only two guys, Italian collector Jean Pigozzi and French curator Andre Magnin?has managed to make some people very angry. Is it not the worst sort of cultural colonialism, detractors ask, for two white Westerners to define what contemporary African art is, especially when their collection consists almost exclusively of self-taught artists? But, as they make clear in the interviews included here, Pigozzi and Magnin make no claim to do anything other than present artists they love, and it is their idiosyncratic tastes that make this catalog (which is being published in conjunction with an exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston) such a surprise and a pleasure. The surprise comes from the sheer scope of inventiveness and variety on display: from the spare, ominous watercolors of Barthelemy Toguo (from Cameroon) to the surrealistic allegories Cheri Samba (of Congo) paints in a slick, commercial art style. Some of the artists produce work at a polar extreme from the scruffy, homemade look one might expect from ?outsider? artists: Rigobert Nimi of Congo uses scavenged materials to build gleaming, precisely rendered models of spaceships and robot factories, and Abu Bockari Mansaray of Sierra Leone draws maniacally detailed diagrams of such devices as a ?Nuclear Telephone Discovered in Hell.? If there is any flaw in this presentation of an explosively imaginative group of artists (33 of them in all, from 14 countries), it is that, with only two or three images for each artist, it feels far too short. Still, for open-minded readers more interested in art itself than what Pigozzi calls ?intellectual art gossip,? this is a book to linger over and absorb slowly, one intoxicating vision at a time. (May) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.