The recently held Launch24 Conference, hosted by Rare Magic Academy and convened by renowned photographer, Oluseyi Adegeye Magic, has left a resounding impact on the African photography community. The conference, which held October 25, at The Zone, Gbagada, Lagos was a beacon of inspiration, education, and empowerment for photographers across the continent. The Marketing and […]
Wall Street Journal Article. A headline of the same name was published later in the
Frieze Magazine. In
The Guardian, he was called “Giant of the Art World” while
The New York Times coined Enwezor “the Curator Who Remapped the Artworld”, and the “Curator Who Shaped a Global View of Contemporary Art”. The list goes on.
Suffice it to say, Okwui Enwezor, a poet, art critic, art historian and curator, was a man of astonishing and global influence an art world giant, whose legacy has not, and probably will not, be forgotten for many years to come.
Born on 23 October 1963 in Calabar, a port city in the South of Nigeria, Enwezor was part of an affluent Igbo family. The reality of the Biafran war (1967-70) meant that much of his childhood was spent moving around to avoid conflict; the family eventually settled in the eastern Nigerian city of Enugu.
Okwui Enwezor imagined the exhibition
Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America as a direct and necessary intervention into the 2020 presidential election campaign in the United States. If the show had opened as planned, at the New Museum in New York last October, it would have been poised to interrupt albeit from the margins of high culture the chaotic, overheated, and largely empty rhetoric of the political campaign with an elegant articulation of substantive artistic responses to the harrowing and unrelenting experience of extreme anti-Black violence in this country, coalescing rather beautifully with months and years of critical thinking and crucial protest from the Black Lives Matter movement. But Enwezor died in 2019 at the age of just fifty-five, following a long fight with cancer. Nothing went as planned last year, and so the show was postponed.