Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club celebrate international creative exchange in 1960s West Africa.
The Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, USA, presents the exhibition Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club’.
This show will feature a series of paintings and drawings by American artist Jacob Lawrence in Nigeria – and the first in-depth look at the international artists who were members of the renowned Mbari Artists and Writers Club, many of whom Lawrence met during an extended stay in Nigeria in 1964.
These artists, including Lawrence, contributed to Black Orpheus, a radical art and culture journal published in Nigeria between 1957 and 1975.
After debuting at the Chrysler Museum, this exhibition – which will run from 8 October 2022 to 8 January 2023, will travel to the New Orleans Museum of Art from 10 February to 7 May 2023, followed by the Toledo Museum of Art from 3 June to 3 September 2023.
“This exhibition explores an incredible moment in the exchange of ideas, when people and countries around the world were fighting for independence from colonialism and when the civil rights movement was achieving success in the United States,” said Kimberli Gant, Ph., co-curator of the exhibition and former curator of modern and contemporary art at the Chrysler Museum of Art, and now curator of modern and contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum.
“During his travels to the African continent in the early 1960s, Jacob Lawrence connected with a vibrant cross-current of political and social ideas circulating there, as richly illustrated by the writing and art presented in Black Orpheus. These artists, in turn, were adapting and integrating modernist theories of art with their local styles, customs and life experiences. The results can be seen in Lawrence’s lesser-known Nigeria series – and in the remarkable range of works in this show that represent the southern hemisphere during a period of transition.”
The exhibition is organised into five sections to guide viewers to the uniqueness of Lawrence’s series, the diversity of the Mbari Club artists and, the African artists who worked during the same period.
Jacob Lawrence and his wife, Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence, travelled to Africa for the first time in 1962, starting in Nigeria, to present an exhibition of several works from their series: Migration, Under the Black Belt and War.
The plan was to present Africans with moments from African American history that represented themes of joy and sorrow, oppression and triumph.
While there, Jacob met with artists affiliated with the legendary Mbari Artists and Writers Club, from visual artists Bruce Onobrakpeya and Vincent Kofi, to writers such as Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe, who at the time were exploring and critiquing Western art traditions through their work published in the groundbreaking journal Black Orpheus.
In 1964, the Lawrence returned to Nigeria for a nine-month stay, meeting again with contemporary artists – and during this time the American artist completed his series of over 25 works in Nigeria.
In this series, he explored themes of spirituality and community, often centred on the marketplace, a crucial meeting place in Nigerian culture. After returning to the United States, this series was shown at his representative’s gallery in New York in 1965 – but has not been exhibited in its entirety since.
The exhibition ‘Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club’ is co-organised by the Chrysler Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art, curated by Kimberli Gant, by Ndubuisi Ezeluomba and, by African art curator Françoise Billion Richardson, at the New Orleans Museum of Art.
The exhibition will be on display from 8 October 2022 to 8 January 2023. For more information, visit the Chrysler Museum of Art.
08/05/2022
