Dakar's urban landscapes: locating modern art and artists in the city.

In cities throughout the world, one identifies the same people with the same preoccupations, expressions, and gestures. There are people in New York who live the same reality and have the same urban problems as people in Dakar. For that reason a guy from New York and a guy from Dakar could recognize themselves in the urban connotation of this expression. It unifies us.

(Cheikh Ndiaye, interview, 1999)

Dakar, the capital city of Senegal, has been a vibrant and dynamic "art world," a particular site for the production, interpretation, and collection of modern art, (1) since 1960, when the new nation's first president, Leopold Sedar Senghor, established its national art school the Ecole des Arts du Senegal. Artists working during the post-independence period pioneered an expressive genre of painting whose distinctive themes and styles were associated with the cultural ideology of Negritude and its promotion by President Senghor. (2) Celebrated for their characteristically African cultural subjects, these early works depicted masks, sculptures, and dancing figures in a decorative and often abstract style.

Much has changed in the course of four decades. The stylistic and thematic repertoire of artists in Dakar today has expanded far beyond that of their predecessors. Their work embraces a multitude of expressive forms and media. In recent years Dakar has come to be considered by many as one of Africa's major metropolises for contemporary art. It is home to the renowned Dak'Art Biennale and a growing number of galleries, a multitude of collectors and critics, and more than one hundred practicing Beaux-Arts--trained artists.

The artists I interviewed in Dakar thoughtfully evaluated their professional trajectories and visual expression in relation to their personal histories and to the city's larger art world and its histories. (3) Such dialogues and artists' narratives are central to constructing knowledge about their individual practices as well as to shaping a broader history of modern art making in the city. In particular, Dakar-based artists frequently associate their own practices with a particular artistic "generation," a term that encompasses both temporal parameters and a shared set of ideas about art practice, formal expression, and artistic persona.

According to these artists, three generations of individuals constitute Dakar's art world. (4) This article focuses on a conceptual and stylistic trend among the third generation, those who graduated from the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in the last decade and have recently begun exhibiting their work. I profile three such artists below to consider their individual roles in creating this trend and to analyze their practices and production in light of the city's history of modern art. In doing so, I also examine how changes in Dakar's art world over the course of four decades are driven by the intersection of local and global dynamics.

One can discern a striking conceptual and artistic trend among those who identify themselves as members of the third generation of Dakar-based, Beaux-Arts trained artists. (5) A handful of individuals, including Soly Cisse Birame Ndiaye, Cheikh Ndiaye, Mohamadou "Douts" Ndoye, Modou Dieng, and Iba Sow, grapple with subjects, questions, and issues particularly related to their residence in the capital city (Fig. 1). Painters by specialty, they create mixed-media works dealing with Dakar's urban landscape, both the built environment and the pastiche of visual traffic that animates it. Whether they allude to city walls as community resources, to the pervasive reach of consumer society, or to the complexities of contemporary urban identity, their artistic production speaks of everyday reality in Dakar. Using acrylic, paper, or photographic collage on canvas, the artists incorporate diverse graphic and textual elements that reference newspaper headlines, consumer bar codes, and graffiti. The resulting compositions appear as visual clips excerpted from the cityscape. Formally, these artists depart from conventional compositions consisting of a well-defined background, foreground, and middleground. With free-floating images and no horizon line, their works suggest the compositional logic and aesthetic of wall graffiti. Compared with the highly decorative work of preceding generations of Dakar-based artists, the urban landscapes exemplify a relatively audacious, eclectic aesthetic.

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According to our interviews, so many young artists work within this theme because they all hold an interest in their urban environment, especially shared space and social experience. While the artists do not consider themselves a movement per se, they do recognize that common thematic preoccupations and stylistic affinities unite their production. As discussed in the following three profiles, each artist associated with this trend renders his own vision of Dakar's urban landscape. The profiles highlight the differences among their personal histories, thematic explorations, formal styles, and exhibition trajectories while exploring the convergences that identify them as agents in creating this artistic trend.

Soly Cisse

Often referred to as the "spearhead of this rising generation" (Payet 1999), Soly Cisse (h. December 29, 1969) graduated from the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1996. His exploration of Dakar's visual traffic began with his art school memoire, an intensive final project required to complete his degree at the Ecole. Though Cisse works primarily as a painter, he began to explore this subject using installation as his medium during the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1998. First and foremost, Cisse considers both his painting and installation work to be critical descriptions of Dakar's contemporary reality in particular and globalizing, urban society in general. His 1998 works Demon and Une vie mystique (A Mystical Life) deal with the potentially destructive features of consumerism, an ever-increasing feature of daily life in Dakar (Figs. 2, 3). As Denton and Une vie mystique illustrate, Cisse works in a theatrical painterly style, juxtaposing seemingly disparate subjects and images.

In the painting Demon, a fiendish beast emerges from the lower left of the composition, his voracious appetite suggested by his pursuit of automobiles and animals. As Cisse was quick to point out, (6) this dramatic scene is intended to leave the viewer wondering whether the beast refers to human beings or to the potentially devastating consequences of consumer society where everything is for sale and anything can be bought. Similarly, Une vie mystique combines fantastic creatures and plant life with consumer bar codes to suggest the ubiquity of global processes of commodification and consumption. The creatures have some human traits but appear mostly animalistic. According to the artist, their presence suggests that people can lose their humanity when they operate on a savage impulse to consume. Both works reveal the artist's contention that rapid urbanization and globalization are accompanied by a deterioration of social norms.

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Nearly the size of a wall, Cisse's large-scale scenes evoke a wide-screen television recounting a fantastically oblique drama. While the particular elements of any one work appear to have little obvious relation to each other, the artist considers each element as a reference to the visual traffic of contemporary urban life. His work is less a representation in the literal, narrative sense than an assemblage of disparate references which Cisse describes as "a lexicon of urban signs" (interview, 1999). The bar codes and serial numbers are crucial signs in contemporary consumer language, serving to measure, codify, and commodify circulating goods. The artist often employs contrast as a visual device, but inverts convention by, for instance, tracing silhouettes in white pen on a black background. Rather than following the standard rules of composition, the figures and objects appear to hang in obscurity, floating across a somber background.

Although Cisse's work has the spontaneous appearance of graffiti, the artist first works out each visual element in his sketchbook. As for his choice of stylistic and formal strategies, Cisse explained that he would never seek to render images of contemporary society naturalistically or realistically. Instead, his central concern is the interpretative vision he brings to the visual and conceptual elements. As with many artists engaged in a critical practice, Cisse emphasizes the importance of constantly experimenting and defining his style. The juxtaposition and interplay of seemingly unrelated objects have been further explored in his recent paintings. The artist has begun to deconstruct his typically large format by superimposing a dozen smaller square canvases onto the larger canvas support, as seen in Particules (Fig. 4). By making these detachable, Cisse endows his work with an interactive component. The viewer/participant can rearrange the episodes rendered on the small canvases to create different relationships.

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Most recently, the artist has begun to experiment with installations, built environments that he sees as an extension of and complement to his painting. His work with installation often brings about formal and conceptual solutions in his painting, and vice versa. In both genres Cisse explores the same issues using a similar graphic language. The installation Pas de jeu, pas de questions (No Stakes, No Questions, 1999) corresponded with a recent water shortage in the city, when bags of water became a commodity in high demand (Fig. 5). The installation was composed of more than sixty plastic bags filled with water, each labeled with a bar code. The bags were arranged in rows and attached to the wall with systematic order. The title Pas de jeu, pas de questions refers to the artist's insistence that viewers consider his work without seeking his interpretation. In this sense, Cisse challenges his audience of visual consumers. By suggesting that they cannot simply seize and admire the artist's stated intention, he acknowledges the multiplicity of perspectives brought to an artwork by its viewers.

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Cisse's exhibition trajectory exemplifies the shift in international exhibition opportunities that have opened up to young artists in the last decade. Cisse has been exhibiting nonstop since 1993 and has quickly become one of the fastest-rising stars on the international scene of contemporary African art. Most notably, he has exhibited in Burkina Faso and Madagascar as well as the 1998 Sao Paulo Biennale and the 2000 and 2002 Dak' Art Biennales. He had his first international solo exhibition in 1999 at the Rauten-strauch-Joest Museum in Cologne. The artist places immense value on these international opportunities, taking advantage of his travel experiences and the dialogue generated by his work. As with his peers in Dakar, Cisse values being informed by the currents around him. He has a sharp critical awareness of how his career has taken off through a series of information-brokering sites such as the Dakar and the Sao Paulo Biennales as well as how his participation in collaborative workshops has informed his own transition from painting to installation.

Birame Ndiaye

The work of a second artist, Birame Ndiaye (b. April 20, 1968), grapples with another facet of Dakar's urban landscape. As with Cisse, Ndiaye's interest in this subject began while he was researching his art school memoire in 1998. His mixed-media-on-canvas works deal with Dakar's built environment, which he calls his city's "concrete jungle" (interview, 2001). (7) He explores how urban architecture imposes order on space, and in doing so configures human existence, social action, and possibility. The artist focuses primarily on the walls of the many decaying structures erected in Dakar during the colonial epoch. These edifices signify both the city's past and the current postcolonial condition. According to Ndiaye, the walls composing these structures further bear witness to the presence of Dakar's residents whose lives they shape. The walls are not only descriptive historical documents but also expressive structures that record as well as encode the activities of the present inhabitants of these buildings.

Ndiaye asserts that Dakar's brick and concrete walls have served as supports for communication since the time of their construction; they routinely display paper flyers announcing parties, festivals, and demonstrations as well as various slogans, proclamations, and opinions painted or written directly on their facades. Conveying a range of perspectives and counterperspectives, Dakar's walls are, in Ndiaye's words, "uncensored supports," unlike the city's newspapers, which communicate official opinions (interview, 1998). To suggest that neighborhood walls are documents of social and commercial interaction among urban inhabitants, the artist often includes in his compositions the vertical tally lines, beuthieuk, that people mark on walls to account for money owed. The presence of Dakar's citizens is further suggested by the looming silhouettes in his collage-and-paint compositions. The mixed-media-on-canvas Concrete Jungle 1 represents these ever-present silhouettes, the anonymous individual and newspaper headlines (Fig. 6).

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Compared to Cisse's work, Ndiaye's is markedly less figural and more self-consciously grafitti-like. The formal elements of his expression deal largely with text and texture. The surfaces suggest a well-worn wall that has been covered and recovered with advertisements (Fig. 7) or words. As a work from his 1999 series Mur mur (Old Wall) illustrates, the artist layers his canvas with paper collage, which he then partially covers with white paint (Fig. 8). He then adds a second layer of collage fragments incorporating photographs, newspaper clippings, and scraps of discarded photocopies. Unlike Soly Cisse, who first works out his compositions in his sketchbook, Birame Ndiaye approaches his canvas as he would a wall, adding a plethora of handwritten words and phrases to create a multilayered pastiche. Like the deteriorating walls of colonial buildings, the surface of the canvas reflects Dakar's history.

[FIGURE 7-8 OMITTED]

The preponderance of textual elements constitutes one of the most striking aspects of Ndiaye's work. Headlines in French, English, and Wolof clipped from local papers situate the canvases in a temporal and spatial frame while signifying the lived cosmopolitan reality of contemporary Dakar. Both the titles of his works and the eclectic mix of visual elements and textual clips also point to the influence of hip-hop, rap, and reggae music. A self-described deejay, Ndiaye samples the resources at his disposal.

In the 1999 exhibition "Les Murs murs de Dakar" (The Old Walls of Dakar), at Dakar's Galerie Lezards, sixteen of the urban landscapes were presented to the local art-viewing public for the first time. Deemed by one Dakar-based critic as an "assassination of contemporary art in Dakar" (Le Temoin 1999), this corpus of works represents a dramatic contrast to the colorful figurative images and modernist traditions so ubiquitous in the city's art scene.

Cheikh Ndiaye

Like his colleagues, Cheikh Ndiaye (b. August 30, 1970) began working with the theme of Dakar's urban landscape before completing his studies at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts in 1998. While he shares a general interest in this subject, his work deals more explicitly with the city as a space for the construction of an urban culture and identity, particularly youth culture and the transposition of hip-hop music to a visual format. For the artist, local and international hip-hop music is the quintessential expression of his generation. This musical form represents his generation's voice and asserts its distinctively urban identity. Ndiaye's intellectual interest in hip-hop music was sparked by his interrogation of his personal and collective identity in postcolonial Dakar. Realizing that he is among a generation born, raised, and schooled in the multiethnic city, he questioned which identity, if any, unites him with his peers. He explained:

   I live with a Serer, a Diola, and a
   Bambara ... there is little difference
   among us. We have the same reality,
   we all speak the same language, we
   don't speak the language of our ancestors ... we
   are all preoccupied by
   the problems of Dakar ... unemployment,
   deteriorating infrastructures,
   and the water shortage. What we
   live is what unites us. My generation
   is cut off from ethnicity but we
   have a different reality, that of daily
   life in the city. (8)

With this discourse, Ndiaye contends that his identity is circumscribed not by ethnicity, as it might have been for previous generations, but by the shared contours of urban space. He views his art as the expression of a generation which, as a consequence, also shares culture, language, and the vicissitudes of daily life. This common ground transcends Dakar, extending to residents in cities across the world.

Ndiaye's Nettitude (1999) and I'm True (1998) exemplify his exploration of the visual language and musical culture associated with urban space (Figs. 9, 10). These mixed-media works make use of the compositional strategies of graffiti. Whether the images are two figures as seen in Nettitude or the seven thug-like caricatures in I'm True, they seem to be free-floating, animating the surface plane as if they were drawn quickly by several artists at different times. Furthermore, Ndiaye's choice of images and their internal arrangement evoke what the anthropologist Dwight Conquergood describes as the icons, symbols, and logos used in the complex communication system of urban graffiti (1994). For instance, in I'm True, the artist has juxtaposed iconic faces with signifying hand gestures. The hand gestures are immediately recognized by those in the know as proclamations of allegiance, solidarity, and membership. Such visual references claim the artist as an urban citizen. Much as the linguist Fiona McLaughlin argues in her discussion of language and urban identity in Dakar, Ndiaye's works entail a process of cultural creation, an act that both reflects and reifies urban belonging (McLaughlin 2001:155).

[FIGURE 9-10 OMITTED]

Nettitude further complicates the tension among identities variously inscribed as ethnic, national, or urban. The title, a word invented by the artist, is a play on Negritude, the term used by former President Senghor to foster a collective national identity in the newly independent Senegal. In sharp contrast to the first-generation artists so implicated in Senghor's discourse on nationhood, Ndiaye asserts little allegiance to a nation-state. Rather, the community with which he aligns himself is ambiguously local and global--it is the urban community. Like his peers, Ndiaye includes elements of text in his work. In Nettitude, the artist suggests the connection to larger global currents with the text written in white pen at the bottom of his painting: "http www@." It is clear that the artist positions himself as truly branche, or connected.

Reading the Urban Landscapes

While grounded in their lived experience in Dakar, the practice and production of artists like Soly Cisse, Birame Ndiaye, and Cheikh Ndiaye cut across geographical boundaries. Dakar's urban realities and visual traffic, as conceptualized and expressed by these artists, intersect with similar phenomena in urban centers around the world. Cheikh Ndiaye calls his canvases "passports" that permit his inclusion in any discussion of urban-based art practice. Similarly, Soly Cisse explained, "I use a universal language in my work. I speak the same graphic language that is spoken by artists around the world. We share a way of looking at the world" (interview, 1998). The artists are not just residents of Dakar but citizens of the city.

This connection to both local and global urban realities has generated a range of critical responses from culture brokers and art writers. Operating from a Western frame of reference in search of the "new" or "authentic," countless gallery owners, curators, and collectors who routinely visit Dakar dismiss the urban landscapes as too Western or not sufficiently African. (9) Uninformed of the Dakarois artists" discourses and perspectives, others assess them as derivative and behind the curve because of their stylistic affinity with the works of the Ivorian artist Ouattara or the American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Significantly, the artists themselves do not view their work as deriving from any other artist or trend, especially not one associated with the New York art world of the 1980s. In fact, that others easily identify them with a global urban aesthetic only reaffirms the positioning of their artistic connection to and beyond Dakar.

Instead of drawing tenuous stylistic comparisons with artists based in Western cities, one would do well to examine the circumstances that gave rise to this trend. The artists' location of their artwork and practice in the city should be viewed in light of both the internal dynamics of Dakar's art world and broader, global circumstances and influences. As for the former, several factors are relevant, especially the artists' training at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts and their approach to practice.

Much has changed since the earliest days at the national art school, when artists were supplied with materials yet offered little technical guidance in an effort to ensure "authentic" African productions. In the past two decades, the school has sought to incorporate a solid technical foundation in studio basics and art history as well as theory and criticism. For the third generation in particular, art training has also become distinctly more research based and critically informed. As the culmination of their studies, students are required to complete an intensive final project, the memoire, in which they investigate the concepts, movements, and individual artists that inform and resonate with their own artistic production. They conduct archival, library, studio, and field research to understand the many dimensions of their subject matter. The memoire allows students to reflect critically on their work and raise questions about its relation to that of other artists or movements. It is, in many respects, essential to envisioning their art as extending beyond the geopolitical parameters of Dakar.

The artists' particular position as urban citizens also relates to "the moment of globalization" they are living. (10) There is little doubt that artists in Dakar today enjoy increased access to and participation in the global exchange of ideas. International dialogues occur not only via the Internet ]out also by way of frequent collaborative workshops and exhibitions. The majority of artists interviewed in the course of my research had participated in some form of international exchange, whether work shop or exhibition. They also experience ever-increasing international exhibition opportunities both in Dakar and abroad. Unlike the 1960s and early 1970s, when the Senegalese government sponsored traveling exhibitions of first-generation artists' works, the current government is rarely involved in organizing such collaborative art events, with the notable exception of the Dak' Art Biennale. (11) More often, these are organized, hosted, and sponsored by the artists themselves or the many foreign cultural centers and other nongovernmental organizations based in Dakar. (12) The French Cultural Center, the Goethe Institute, and the Belgian nongovernmental organization Vredeseilanden have been particularly instrumental in creating workshop opportunities for Senegalese artists as well as those from their home countries.

These exchanges allow artists to become acquainted with each other and their work, initiate discussions on common and divergent issues, and foster international connections. In the case of several third generation artists, international collaborative workshops have expanded their perspectives and provided an arena of experimentation in terms of materials and techniques. Soly Cisse's participation in a workshop at the Sao Paulo Biennale launched his transition from painting to installation. The artists' own assessment of their cosmopolitan sensibility is further shaped and affirmed by these arenas, where they see that their work relates formally and conceptually to that of their international colleagues. While they do not always have access to resources such as digital media, Dakarois artists do grapple with critical questions and formal language similar to those faced by practitioners in other parts of the world. As one third-generation artist explained, "What I am trying to do is make a work that can be valued and appreciated everywhere ... I have a tendency towards the global. I am on the internet; I speak Wolof, French, and English ... I am a man of the world." (13)

The urban landscapes stand in sharp contrast to the practices and discourses of the first-generation artists active in the period following Senegal's independence in 1960. That period of artistic production is well known for its connection to a nexus of ideas about national identity, inherent African creativity, and state patronage of the arts. The artistic output of third-generation artists has little to do with the formulation of a national identity or demonstration of a cultural ideology. To some extent, it is constructed in relation to the first generation of artists. Third-generation artists are quick to point out that they are not the children of independence but, as Cheikh Ndiaye explained, a generation of truly urban inhabitants, born and raised in Dakar. As such, they are especially qualified to speak to urban themes and postcolonial issues. Their artistic production and accompanying discourses underscore James Holston and Arjun Appadurai's discussion of postcolonial cities as spaces in which "a new generation has arisen to create urban cultures severed from the colonial memories and nationalist fictions on which independence and subsequent rule were founded" (Holston & Appadurai 1996:189).

Cheikh Ndiaye (interview, 1999) offered that

   art born from urban Africa is an
   art without ethnic connotation,
   an art expressing the concerns,
   anxieties, and hopes of everyday
   urban life. My painting is also a
   cry, an attitude in the face of the
   hardships of everyday reality, facing
   the unknown, the walls surrounding
   us, obstructing us. It is
   the expression of an Africa that
   suddenly is discovering itself easily
   influenced and capable of influencing.
   My painting claims a
   right to citizenship, a passport to
   the world.

The urban landscapes and artists' discourses also redefine Dakar's place in the world. No longer the capital of a newly independent nation, it is a cosmopolitan city linked to other global cities. According to the artist Modou Dieng, these works proclaim that "their makers are citizens of the here and now, of Dakar or virtually any urban site." (14)

Undoubtedly, the urban landscapes of Soly Cisse, Birame Ndiaye, Cheikh Ndiaye, and other Dakar artists who work in this mode reveal the dramatic changes that have occurred in Dakar based art practice over the course of four decades. They offer a compelling case study affording insight into how artists in a specific geographical site or art world create, participate in, and identify with international artistic currents. Most of all, when coupled with the voices of their makers, these works express the artists' own sense of cosmopolitanism and the positioning of their practice in a dynamic, hybrid, and ambiguous urban space--a space that is at once local and global.

[This article was accepted for publication in April 2003.]

This article is a modified and expanded version of a paper prepared for "The View from Africa: The Internal Evolution of Contemporary African Art," a panel organized by Simon Ottenberg for the Twelfth Triennial Symposium on African Art, St. Thomas, United States Virgin Islands, in April 2001. Field and archival research was made possible by the generous support of the following: Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program (June 1998-June 1999); National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution's Pre Doctoral Dissertation Grant (August 1999-August 2000); and Denison University Research Foundation (May-August 2001 and May-August 2002).

(1.) This assertion builds on a body of scholarship that posits every art-producing site as an art world with its own particular dynamics and histories. In this view, art production and consumption are not forcibly directed from an art center to the peripheries but rather are unique to a particular locale. See Becket 1982, Fabian 1996, Szombati-Fabian & Fabian 1976, Plattner 1996.

(2.) The term "Negritude" was coined by the Martiniquan poet and politician Aime Cesaire, who defined it as "the simple recognition of being black and the acceptance of this fact, of our destiny as black people, of our history, and of our culture" (quoted in Irele 1977). The relationship between Senghor's cultural policy and Negritude is treated extensively in M'Bengue 1973 and by Senghor in Deliss 1996. For a detailed, illustrated discussion of work associated with the first generation artists, often referred to as the Ecole de Dakar, see Harney 2002.

(3.) I interviewed 120 artists, collectors, and critics in Dakar during two field research trips supported by the FulbrightHays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program and the Denison University Research Foundation. The translations of all French language interviews and published texts are mine.

(4.) I was told that the first-generation artists are those who began their practices during the 1960s and early 1970s. Artists who began their careers between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s identify themselves as members of the second generation of Dakar-based artists. The third generation consists of those who began their art school training in the late 1980s and 1990s.

(5.) The national art school has undergone several name changes since its inception in 1961. From 1961 to 1971 it was the Ecole des Arts du Senegal, and from 1971 to 1977 the Institut National des Arts du Senegal. Since 1977 it has been the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts du Senegal. For more on the history and organization of the school, see Axt & Sy 1989.

(6.) I tape-recorded my interviews with the artist in Dakar on September 3, 1998; June 16, 1999; and June 26, 2001.

(7.) The works dealing with Dakar's concrete jungle refer to Bob Marley's popular reggae song bearing the same title. For more on the representation of motifs and icons related to musical culture in Dakar's graffiti murals, see Roberts & Roberts 2000. I tape-recorded my interview with the artist in Dakar on August 13, 1998, and conducted another interview on July 20, 2001.

(8.) I tape-recorded my interview with Cheikh Ndiaye in Dakar on April 26, 1999.

(9.) The value placed on contemporary African works that correspond with Western notions of authenticity and Africanite has promoted a handful of contemporary African artists in Western art venues. Moreover, it has inscribed the artists and their work within a field of difference, because different criteria are used in the valuation of non-Western artistic production. One readily observable consequence of this position is that contemporary African art is only rarely exhibited in galleries cooled to contemporary art. Most often it is seen in galleries dedicated to African or global arts. In the past, when this artistic production was exhibited in sites outside Africa, it was valued for its particularly African contribution. For more on this, see Olu Oguibe 1994.

(10.) Ndary Lo, interview with the author. Raffinerie Mbo, Senegal, April 28, 1999.

(11.) Hosted and partially funded by the Senegalese government, the Dak'Art Biennale has taken place in 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002.

(12.) In addition, galleries in Dakar are demonstrating a growing interest in foreign artists In 1998 and 1999 Galerie Vema exhibited the works of five Argentine artists, Galerie ARe had a show of works by the French artist Pierre Brisson and two Burkinabe artists, and Guy Gut hosted the exhibition of the Swiss artist Pano Parini.

(13.) Ndary Lo, interview, 1999.

(14.) Modou Dieng, interview with the author. Providence, Rhode Island, March 10, 2001.

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