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The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End
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Yinka Shonibare, MBE (British, b.1962)
100 Years, 2000
Emulsion, acrylic on Dutch wax printed cotton textile, painted wood; 98 in. x 27 ft. 11 in. (248.9 x 850.9 cm), each panel: 11 7/8 x 11 7/8 in. (30 x 30 cm)
Collection of Ninah and Michael Lynne, New York
Read about this artist.
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This installation takes the form of a monumental sampler of one hundred panels of wax prints that the artist purchased in Brixton South London and which Vlisco manufactured in Helmond, Holland for "African" consumers. These are arranged in twenty vertical columns. Each swatch of cloth is stretched as a canvas suggesting the highly circumscribed Western pictorial tradition. Over half of these are altered by painterly interventions that obliterate their designs. Not only does the artist make it intentionally difficult to distinguish between painted and unpainted panels, but the authorship of the textiles themselves is placed in question given that their designs are originally derived from Indonesian textile sources. Furthermore, given the popular reception by African consumers of many of the textile prints highlighted, most have been reproduced and reissued in new editions throughout the past century. The visual intensity of this dense tableau of contrasting patterns and their underlying conceptual order challenges the idea of the grid in Modernism and invites association with the expansive scope, dynamism, and structure of woven West African textiles. At the same time, it heightens our awareness of the cosmopolitanism of the creative process and degree to which African aesthetics are inextricably intertwined with those of the world beyond.
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