SELECTED WRITINGS, Volume 1: Toward a New African Art Discourse, edited by Terry Smith

444pp., illus., paperback, Duke University Press, Durham & London, 2025

ISBN: 9781478031529

This volume, the first of a two-volume set of the most influential and foundational writings of pathbreaking curator, critic, essayist, and theorist Okwui Enwezor (1963-2019), includes fifteen essays written between 1994 and 2006. Selected Writings, Volume 2: Curating the Postcolonial Condition is also available.

Drawn from exhibition catalogs, art journals, interviews with artists, art reviews, curatorial statements, historical studies, and book chapters, these texts show him striving to fulfil the first main ambition that drove his career: to found and sustain what he called a “New African Art Discourse.”

“This selection of Okwui Enwezor’s writings offers an intimate look into the beliefs that fueled his practice: those of plurality, fluidity, and openness. It is through these writings that we are able to stay the course of Enwezor’s incomparable vision and insist, as he did, on an expansive understanding of the world and all those who inhabit it.” Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator, Studio Museum in Harlem

“In 1997, Okwui Enwezor reflected on the difference between the Johannesburg Biennale, the first major international exhibition of his career, and Documenta, pointedly remarking that we have ‘other priorities.’ This comment not only came to characterize that foray into the world of global curation but became the through line for all of his endeavors. As this volume attests, the stakes of Enwezor’s exhibitions were elucidated in their context and through his writing, which is inextricable from and yet also independent of them. He had a distinct historical, political, worldly, theoretical, and poetic rigor and love for the jostling of ideas, stories, and positions that would set the various fields in which he engaged in new directions through his singular momentum. These assembled texts reflect a lifetime committed to developing his voice, changing the worlds of art, and creating a new language with the intellectual heft, complexity, and dynamism to make a case for his presence and those he championed.” Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and Associate Director of Curatorial Programs, Whitney Museum of American Art

Okwui Enwezor is widely regarded as a leader among the brilliant curators who emerged in the 1990s to set agendas for understanding the global expansiveness of contemporary art. Among his pathfinding exhibitions were the second Johannesburg Biennale (1997), the paradigm-shifting Documenta11 (2002), Archive Fever (2008), and Postwar (2016). He was Director of Haus der Kunst, founder of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art and co-author of numerous books and exhibition catalogues, including Rise and Fall of Apartheid, photography and the bureaucracy of everyday life (with Rory Bester) and El Anatsui, the reinvention of sculpture (with Chika Okeke-Agulu).

Terry Smith is Andrew W. Mellon Emeritus Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh and Professor at Large, The Africa Institute, Global Studies University, Sharjah.