Omar Farah
March 19, 2024


"He is Essentially an Africanist": The Decade Show's Abandonment of the Afrocentric for the Afrovertical


The May 1990 Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity — which opened as a collaborative exhibition between the Studio Museum in Harlem, the New Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art (MoCHA) — tackled the enormous, impossible, but imperative task of reflecting on the seismic cultural shifts that transpired in 1980s America. Although heavily maligned by contemporaneous critics as a "messy" retrospective, the Decade Show has found increasing historical relevance — more often for its revelations about the then-emerging politics of 1990s multiculturalism than its real-time historiography of 1980s art.

 One such historical insight of the exhibition is as an early window into how the nineties would answer the evergreen and intractable question of how Africa, aesthetically and culturally, would figure in late twentieth century articulations of Black American identity. Despite being focused on a decade that saw the climax of Africa fever in Black academia and Black radical politics, the exhibition shied away from placing Africa at the center. Instead, the show's curators opted to present what I call an Afrovertical politics — figuring the significance of Africa to African Americans only as a vertical lineage and turning away from the 1980s politics of afrocentricity that demanded Africa remain a live, simultaneous, and centered subject in Black American discourse. 

Drawing on the Julia Ann P. Herzberg Papers, insight into the complex curatorial discourse around how to place the African continent and its culture emerges. From the choice of artists to who would serve on the exhibition's advisory council, the dynamic and weighty politics of afrocentricity loomed large in the curators minds. These questions were particularly top of mind for Studio Museum Director Kinshasha Holman Conwill and Chief Curator Sharon Patton, who due to the mission of their institution as well as their personal and educational experiences were already deeply mired in the constant and complicated questions of Black identity in America. With a close reading of meeting minute notes and checklists from the years leading up to the Decade Show, its Afrovertical politics slowly crystallize as a distinct departure from the Afrocentric fever of the very decade it aimed to historicize. 

Rigorous archival research into curatorial processes reveals that exhibitions are directly in conversation with academic and political discourse. One such link between the two realms of discourse, essential to understanding how the Decade Show figured in shifting Afrocentric emphasis in Black discourse, is the unit of the advisory council within the exhibition making process. For a show of this magnitude, which was to float among three major New York City institutions, an advisory council of scholars and community leaders was suggested as a means to bolster the political influence and clarity of the project. By April 1988, over two years before the show would open, the question of who would comprise such a council came up in a meeting of the curators. 

The state of the Black academy in the late 1980s was deeply fractured, not housed under faculties dedicated to Black studies (be it Africana Studies, Black Studies, African-American Studies, etc.) as is commonplace today. In fact, it was only in 1988, at Temple University, that Professor Molefi Asante founded the first doctoral program for African-American Studies. The founder of afrocentricity, a Black Studies framework that "privileges African agency within the context of African history and culture transcontinentally and trans-generationally," Asante is an apt symbol for the tenor of Black Studies at the time of the Decade Show's inception. The foil to Asante, that represents the old guard's moderation at this juncture is surely Henry Louis Gates — whose project of defining a unique African American artistic tradition (in his case more particularly in literature than the visual arts) was represented by works like The Signifying Monkey and Figures in Black, both penned in the late 1980s and at the center of discussion in the years leading up to the Decade Show. 

The Decade Show curators approach to this academic fracture was to largely side step the question of Africa all together, expressing caution around choices on either pole of the debate and emphasizing artists over academics in their final choices for the advisory council. The first mention of an advisory council came up during a meeting of the show's curators on April 12, 1988 at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Upon New Museum Director Marcia Tucker's suggestion of an advisory council, a lively exchange erupted around some of the names thrown out. Studio Museum Director Kinshasa H. Conwill immediately objected to Professor Cornel West, an academic from the traditional Gates guard (albeit more progressive) who had been invested in the notion of building and articulating an  African-American artistic tradition, but who Conwill felt had been too dismissive of existing Black cultural contributions. On the other end, Studio Museum Chief Curator Sharon Patton dismissed the suggestion of Yale art history professor Robert Farris Thompson whom Patton warned was, "essentially an Africanist and that his interest in African American culture is only in those aspects that refer to African culture and evidence of it in the new world." Patton, who herself obtained a doctorate in African art, failed to see the relevance of an Africanist in the oversight of this exhibition.

 These two comments, back to back according to the minute notes, show the Studio Museum curators grappling with how to balance the academic polarization on the question of Africa's place in contemporary Black culture and art particularly. Although the advisory council selection process helps evidence the moderate tendencies of the Decade Show curators when it came to the figuration of Africa in the show, it is in their artist lists and ultimately in the final checklist that the three-dimensional politics of the exhibition in regards to Africa emerges.

Initial checklists, as the broadest net of what an exhibition aims to cover, offer insight into the widest possible bounds of an exhibition. In short, if it doesn't come up in the early dream phase, it is not likely an interest of the show — even tangentially. For the same April 12th meeting where the issue of the advisory council was broached, the Studio Museum prepared a preliminary list of artists. Across the list of 41 artists were only traces of connections to the African continent, with none of the artists being African born. The message, by omission, was that Africa was not a necessary venue to directly access in order to understand 1980s America. Instead, the curators selected, edited, re-edited, and finally presented a group of artists in the Decade Show who made only gestures to African traditions both culturally and religiously, always an order removed from the physical continent itself.

Amongst 94 artists and with over 200 works, Houston Conwill's The New Cakewalk (1989)  is a rare nod to Africa in a Decade Show otherwise uninterested in the continent. In this performance work, documented in a video and presented in a multimedia installation, Conwill choreographs an eccentric dance on an even more eccentric map. In line with the title, Conwill is riffing of a historical dance performed by enslaved peoples for white slave masters. The dance, acted out on a cartography of important cities in the Black struggle in the United States, is at once bewildering, brutalizing, frustratingly circular, and unrelentingly collaborative. In glistening leotards, purple for the women and silver for the men, a partially choreographed, partially improvised plot unfolds between the dancers as they move endlessly but in terms of displacement and resolution seem to move nowhere. The performance is a stunning portrait of African-American culture in motion, ever-changing, and ever resisting. 

In an explanation of the piece offered for Project:19 Houston Conwill shown at MoMA in November 1989, just under a year before the Decade Show, Conwill connects the piece heavily to the African continent. Citing Robert Farris Thompson, the very scholar Studio Museum curators blocked from consideration for their advisory committee, Conwill connects the map in his performance to Kongolese cosmology. Of the quartered circle that constitutes the cartography of the performance, Conwill says, "for the Kongo people, in addition to signifying a crossroads, the ideogram's horizontal line divided the living from the kingdom of the dead." This historical connection offers room to read Conwill's performance as one that moves across temporalities and engages ancestors. This is a throughline across African-American literature and music and art — but this particular text by Conwill evidences an explicit connection between his offering of contemporary black dance and the traditions of the African continent. 

Conwill's work, as a rare representation within the Decade Show of any engagement with the subject of Africa, embodies the exhibition's conception of how the continent figures in contemporary African-American culture and art. In its limited presence, Africa is engaged as a spiritual and cosmic authority. When it surfaces, in art like Conwill's, it is a symbol of the ancestor whose traditions must be respected but are not necessarily acknowledged as ongoing but an ocean away. In these regards, Conwill's work — as a rare representation of the Decade Show's engagement with Africa — speaks to the afrovertical politics of the exhibition. Africa — in this configuration — is surely not at the center as it existed in Black academic and political discourse in the eighties, but is actually relegated to a historical subject. It is a land of yesterday, a place that lives perpetually above Black America in a family tree that droops over the Atlantic. This is present too in works from both Betye Saar and her daughter Allison Saar whose practices both draw in mythological and spiritual symbolism from the African continent but in the process fossilize its value. Whereas the political and scholarly discourse of the 1980s sat horizontal to the continent of Africa — aiming to draw connections to the simultaneous thought on both continents — the work by Black artists in the Decade Show only ever imagined itself in a vertical configuration with Africa.  

Although not often regarded in such a manner, the Decade Show represents a significant inflection point in the public discourse around Blackness in America. Supposedly historicizing a decade that worked hard to figure Africa as a contemporary subject, the retrospective exhibition instead preemptively dove into the politics of multiculturalism that would come to dominate 1990s art  — willing to only acknowledge Africa as a distinct and historical homeland. In its afrovertical politics, the Decade Show would usher in an era of multiculturalism that would figure Black artists and their assumed-to-be "Black art" as a simple color in a rainbow coalition of cultures and peoples who were both defined by their "ethnic" origin but at the same time disconnected from their roots in the dream/nightmare of the American melting pot. Further scholarship must consider how this era of politics and particularly art politics ushered in the frustrations both curatorially and artistically that would surface in the early 2000s with notions of the Post-Black and resistance to the multicultural narrative. In the ever-dynamic discourse around how Blackness and the subjects associated with the construct see themselves in relation to art, the Decade Show is an important historical moment in late 20th century figurations of where Africa lies in the subjectification of Black America — a moment that remains resonant as the question of Africa continues to loom large in contemporary art discourse across the Black diaspora.





Bibliography


Asante, Molefi Kete, An Afrocentric Manifesto: Toward an African Renaissance, 2-3. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2007.


Conwill, Houston. Projects 19 : Houston Conwill. The Museum of Modern Art. 1989. https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_2119_300062955.pdf. 


Kendi, I. X, The Radically Antiracist Idea of Molefi Kete Asante. Journal of Black Studies, 542-558. 2018. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021934718786124


"Review of the Decade meeting minutes and notes", April 12, 1988, MSS.014, box 2, folder 34, item A, Julia Ann P. Herzberg Papers, Center for Curatorial Studies Library and Archives, Bard College.


"Review of the Decade meeting minutes and notes", April 12, 1988, MSS.014, box 2, folder 34, item D, Julia Ann P. Herzberg Papers, Center for Curatorial Studies Library and Archives, Bard College.


Smith, Roberta. 1990. 3 Museums Collaborate to Sum up a Decade. The New York Times. May 25. https://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/25/arts/review-art-3-museums-collaborate-to-sum-up-a-decade.html.