Magazines - Tribal Art Summer 2010

By Nii Otokunor Quarcoopome, curator of African art and head of the department of Africa, Oceania, and Indigenous Americas at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Introduction
The exhibition, Through African Eyes: The European in African Art, 1500 through the Present, examines the five-hundred-year interchanges between African cultures and European outsiders. The show reveals how African artists have documented their societies’ evolving notions about, and shifting attitudes toward, the “Exotic White Stranger.” By emphasizing the opinions of Africans living on the continent, the exhibition casts the European as the cultural “other” and reverses longstanding Eurocentric perspectives that have dominated the discourse about the ongoing dialogue between Africa and the West. Some of these African ideas will likely contradict certain long-held impressions about the relationship.
The cultures residing along the Atlantic coasts of West and Central Africa first encountered modern white Europeans in the fifteenth century, when Portuguese merchants arrived to initiate a sea-based trade network. Soon, other European entities joined this commercial activity. Besides reorienting many African economies, this European trade brought enormous financial gains to African leaders, which played out in vibrant art production. Although some past exhibitions have addressed aspects of African-European relations, Through African Eyes by far represents the most exhaustive treatment. It provides riveting visual commentaries on various phases in the broad history of this intercultural dialogue—from early commercial relations to the settlement of Europeans in Africa, to the tensions arising from Europe’s colonial domination, and then to the recent post-independence interactions with the West.