Welcome

Today is the last before artists begin arriving for the exhibition, Artists in Dialogue: António Ole and Aimé Mpane at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art.

This exhibition came about as the result of the museum’s desire to bring lesser known African artists to the United States. It has also been my first exhibition since I joined the staff of the museum (called NMAfA in house). I proposed the concept of having the artists respond to one another, to invite them to a visual dialogue. And within my first week I reached out to António Ole of Angola and Aimé Mpane of Congo (Kinshasa) and Belgium to find out if they would be interested in joining me to launch this new series. They both agreed.

First, I would like to thank both of these extraordinary artists for agreeing to participate in an unusual and challenging endeavor. Artists in Dialogue is conceived as a series of conversations: the exchange of past accomplishments and new ideas between two artists, the ongoing correspondence between artists and curator, and an effort by both artists and museum reaching out to its communities – be they DC natives, national and international visitors, or interested parties bouncing about cyber space.

This blog is intended to tell the story of this exhibition and it serves as an open invitation to readers and anyone you think might be interested to engage me, the artists, the museum, one another… in dialogue – the hopefully open, but often complicated exchange of words, ideas, and images.

As Mikhail Bakhtin wrote, “There is neither a first nor a last word and there are no limits to the dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundless future).” A blog is the perfect way to put this notion to the test.