Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club

FAIN: GI-287686-22

New Orleans Museum of Art (New Orleans, LA 70179-0123)
Ndubuisi Ezeluomba (Project Director: January 2022 to November 2022)
Lisa Rotondo-McCord (Project Director: November 2022 to November 2024)

Implementation of a traveling exhibition on the artistic exchange between African American artist Jacob Lawrence and West African artists during Lawrence’s travels to Nigeria in the 1960s.

Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence & the Mbari Club is a traveling exhibition jointly organized by the Chrysler Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art that highlights an under-researched body of work by the African American artist Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), and celebrates the little-known creative exchange that occurred between Lawrence and his West African-based contemporaries during the 1960s. Lawrence’s travels to Nigeria in 1962 and 1964 occurred just a few years after Nigerian independence, when the citizens were embracing self-governance and developing the strategies to present a modern Nigeria to the world. The arts—music, literature, and drama—contributed forcefully to this sense of self-determination. The exhibition also explores his relationship with the Mbari Artists and Writers Club, an organization of continental African-based artists, writers, and dramatists promoting modern African artistic practice, and the Club's arts journal publication Black Orpheus.

Associated Products

Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club (Catalog)
Title: Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club
Author: Kimberli Grant
Author: Ndubuisi Ezeluomba
Abstract: he first book to feature Jacob Lawrence’s Nigeria series, this richly illustrated volume also highlights Africa’s place as a global center of modernist art and culture. This revelatory book shines a light on the understudied but important influence of African Modernism on the work of Black American artist Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000). In 1965, a New York gallery displayed Lawrence’s Nigeria series: eight tempera paintings of Lagos and Ibadan marketplaces that were the culmination of an eight-month stay in Nigeria. Lawrence’s residency in Nigeria put him in touch with the Mbari Artists and Writers Club, an international consortium of artists and writers in post-independence Nigeria that published the arts journal Black Orpheus. The book and accompanying exhibition place the Nigeria series alongside issues of Black Orpheus and artwork created by Mbari Club artists, including Uche Okeke, Jacob Afolabi, Susanne Wenger, and Naoko Matsubara. Diverse essays explore the influence of Africa’s post-colonial movement on American modernists and developing African artists; the women of the Mbari group; and the importance of art publications in circulating knowledge globally.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://shop.noma.org/products/black-orpheus-jacob-lawrence-and-the-mbari-club?_gl=1*3e12aj*_ga*Mzk3ODM5NTU4LjE3MDQ5OTM4MzQ.*_ga_8WGYEYPRXB*MTcwNzQ5Njg4Mi4zMS4xLjE3MDc0OTkwNzcuMC4wLjA.
Primary URL Description: Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club at NOMA's Museum Shop.
Secondary URL: http://https://search.worldcat.org/title/1309962069
Secondary URL Description: Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club at Worldcat.org
Catalog Type: Exhibition Catalog
Publisher: Yale University Press

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