Teaching the contemporary: disjunctures and accommodations. (dialogue).

Everyone who actively follows the fortunes of African art in either academic settings or the museum world knows that the boundaries of the field are being revised. Contemporary genres are occupying an ever larger space in our consciousness, thanks to the groundbreaking work mainly by African curators and critics over the last decade. The question is, how is this being translated into either pedagogy or museum practice by a generation of African art teachers and curators who are more familiar with masks and shrine sculpture than Triangle workshops and Biennales? To find out, we began with teaching and asked four well-known Africanists to comment on their own experience. Kate Ezra curated the African collection at the Met before switching to a teaching career at Chicago's liveliest art school, Columbia College. Babatunde Lawal headed one of Nigeria's major university art departments at what is now Obafemi Awolowo University before relocating to Virginia Commonwealth University. Ray Silverman taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz before joining the faculty at Michigan State University, and while best known for his work in Akan metallurgy he has added Ethiopia and postcolonial Maconde art to his interests. Chris Roy has been a major trainer of graduate students in the University of Iowa program as well as the moving force behind the Stanley collection of African art at that institution. All four turned out to have contemporary-art connections which have been overshadowed by their published work in canonical genres. Three teach graduate students, two at the M.A. and one at the Ph.D. level.

Here are some questions we posed to them: As Fred Lamp discovered in a recent First Word salvo (African Arts, Spring 1999), many graduate students and younger scholars are interested primarily in the contemporary forms of African art and far less so in traditional fieldwork in rural areas, reconstructing the art history of the precolonial past. Where does this leave you as a teacher? Conversely, where does it leave your students? Are they expected to "know it all?" If they study genres you never dealt with and theory you haven't read, what happens when the traditional direction of the flow of knowledge is reversed? If the Renaissance specialist in my department does only Italy in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, should I be trying to teach and understand in depth both Igbo Ukwu and William Kentridge? In the teaching profession, are we more effective training the next generation as African-art generalists, or should we be promoting the idea that African art is really now bifurcated into two different subfields: precolonial-traditional-canonical and postcolonial-modern-contemporary, with colonialism providing the gray area of overlap?