| GI-287686-22 | Public Programs: Exhibitions: Implementation | New Orleans Museum of Art | Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club | 9/1/2022 - 10/31/2023 | $300,000.00 | Lisa | | Rotondo-McCord | | | | New Orleans Museum of Art | New Orleans | LA | 70179-0123 | USA | 2022 | Art History and Criticism | Exhibitions: Implementation | Public Programs | 300000 | 0 | 300000 | 0 | 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. |