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 present)
GI-287686-22
Exhibitions: Implementation
Public Programs
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Totals:
$300,000 (approved)
$300,000 (awarded)
Grant period:
9/1/2022 – 10/31/2023
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Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club
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.
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