Oct 14 2018 - Jan 6 2019
Austin, TX
The High Museum of Art will be the first venue in the United States to present this major touring exhibition, which offers a fresh look at African design through a myriad of diverse works by more than 120 artists. Ranging from playful to provocative to political, the works include sculpture, prints, fashion, furniture, film, photography, apps, maps, digital comics, and more.
The exhibition offers a vision of Africa in the twenty-first century as a place of unbounded optimism, rapid growth, and massive cultural transformation and presents the continent as a hub of experimentation that generates innovative design approaches and solutions with worldwide relevance. Making Africa focuses on a generation of entrepreneurs, thinkers, and designers from and within Africa who address a global audience and provide the world with a new vantage point on their continent. They often work across several disciplines simultaneously and break with conventional definitions of design, art, photography, architecture and film.The exhibition also illustrates how the artists use their work to effect significant economic, social, and political change.
Making Africa is divided into four parts. The first part, Prologue, is concerned with the western preconception of Africa, but also poses a number of questions. Who speaks about the continent, and how? The second part, I and We, explores how design provides an effective tool to communicate about ourselves, and thus portrays current and past social and cultural developments in Africa. The third part, Space and Object, is dedicated to the individual and their immediate environment – the city, technological developments and materials play equal parts in this space. The fourth and final part, Origin and Future, explores through contemporary African culture and its roots through objects and artifacts.