Closing Weekend Of “not all realisms: photography, Africa and the long 1960s”

Written by Ayana Contreras on June 2, 2023

“The sixties were a long time coming. The sixties keep coming back,” notes the tagline of the exhibition, which closes June 4, 2023 at the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago.

[cover image: Installation view, not all realisms: photography, Africa, and the long 1960s, Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago. Photo by Robert Chase Heishman.]

*Malick Sidibé, Nuit de Noël (Happy Club), 1963, printed 2002, Gelatin silver print. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Gift of the Estate of Lester and Betty Guttman, 2014.720.*

“Treating the 1960s expansively as an era and idea, the show examines photography’s role in relation to a time of intense self-consciousness about change, celebration, stagnancy, struggle, and representation,” according to exhibition promotional materials.

not all realisms: photography, Africa, and the long 1960s, focuses on Ghana, Mali, and South Africa and features. Much of the work in the show is photography made for mass consumption, some circulated in DRUM magazine (an iconic South African publication), for instance, as well as via photographic prints, books, pamphlets and posters. Also included is mid-century portraiture by celebrated Malian photographers Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé, work that further illustrates a proud, self-assured vision of Africanness, and represents a keen desire to illustrate visions of post-colonial modernity. That desires mirrors a the motivation behind Black American magazines such as Ebony and Jet, which were both founded and based half a world away from Africa, right here in Chicago.

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not all realisms also features a selection of work by contemporary African artists, such as Inspired by Romare Bearden and Ernest Cole by Sam Nhlengethwa (2018), and Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s When the Going Is Smooth and Good (2017). Both works inject the energy of the earlier pieces into 21st century contexts.

Installation view, not all realisms: photography, Africa, and the long 1960s, Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago. Photo by Robert Chase Heishman. Works pictured (left to right): Malick Sidibé, Nuit de Noël (Happy Club), 1963, printed 2002, Gelatin silver print. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Gift of the Estate of Lester and Betty Guttman, 2014.720. Njideka Akunyili Crosby, When the Going Is Smooth and Good, 2017, Acrylic, solvent transfer, colored pencil, charcoal and collage on paper. Collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

not all realisms: photography, Africa and the long 1960s was curated by Leslie M. Wilson, Associate Director of Academic Engagement and Research at the Art Institute of Chicago, with Berit Ness, Associate Director and Curator of Academic Engagement, for the Feitler Center for Academic Inquiry at the Smart Museum of Art.

The Smart Museum is located on The University of Chicago campus at 5550 S. Greenwood Avenue, Chicago, IL, 60637. A companion reader for the show can be found here.