Presented by the IHC African Research Focus Group, Idee Levitan IHC Endowed Lecture Series, and UCSB Arts Symposium Wednesday, May 7 / 5 P.M. / Free IV Theatre 1 Born in Nigeria, Okwui Enwezor, is the Artistic Director of Documenta11, in Kassel Germany, 2002. He was the Artistic Director of the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, 1997. Enwezor now holds a position as the Adjunct Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the publisher and founding editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, a critical art journal co-published with the African Studies Center at Cornell University. A poet, critic, and curator, Enwezor has written extensively on contemporary art and artists, as well as on American and international art and artists. His recent essays have appeared in numerous international exhibition catalogues and books, including Future, Present, Past (47th Venice Biennale), Inklusion Exklusion (Steirischer Herbst, Graz, Austria), CROSSING: Time, Movement, Space (Art Museum, University of South Florida, Tampa), Interzones (Kunstforigen, Copenhagen), Transforming the Crown (Studio Museum in Harlem and Bronx Museum), Contemporary South African Art: Gencor Collection (Jonathan Ball Publishers, Johannesburg), Democracy’s Images: Photography and Visual Art After Apartheid (BildMuseet). As a critic, Enwezor is a correspondent for Flash Art, consulting editor to Atlantica (a bilingual art and culture publication of the Museo Centro Atlantic de Arte Moderno, Canary Islands), editor-at-large of aRude and a regular contributor to Frieze, International Review of African-American Art, Third Text, Index on Censorship, Glendora Review, Africa World Review, African Profiles International and SIKSI, amongst others. He was one of the speakers at 100 days - 100 guests (Documenta X, Kassel, 1997), Ecole des Beaux Arts Superieur, (Paris), Royal College of Art (London), Moderna Museet, (Stockholm), National Arts Academy (Oslo), Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (Annandale on Hudson, New York), Humboldt University zu Berlin, and Columbia University, New York. Some of Enwezor’s curatorial credits are In/sight: African Photographers, 1940-Present, which he co-curated at the Guggenheim Museum (New York). Modern Life at Alijira Center for Contemporary Art in conjunction with the Newark Museum. Mirror’s Edge, Bild Museet, Umea and Kiasma : Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki. He was one of a group of international curators preparing a major survey of conceptual art, entitled Global Conceptualism at the Queens Museum (New York) in April 1999. He also organized a major survey of South African Photographer David Goldblatt at Equitable Gallery (New York) during 2000. He organized The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945- 1994 at the Museum Villa Stuck, Munich which opened in March 2001 and traveled to Berlin, Chicago and New York. Enwezor is the co-editor, with Olu Oguibe of Reading the Contemporary: African Art, From Theory to the Marketplace (Institute for International Visual Arts: INIVA, London and MIT Press), forthcoming Spring 1999, and is a contributor to CREAM: Contemporary Art and Culture, (Phaidon Press, London). Enwezor has served on numerous juries and committees, including the Jury for the 1998 Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum and was on the International Advisory Committee of 1999 Carnegie International and is the recipient of the 1998 Peter Norton Family Foundation Curator’s Grant. At present Enwezor is preparing a book, Structural Adjustment, on the practice of Contemporary African Artists in the 1990s. He divides his time between New York and Kassel. Top of Page <<Back