Artist Modou Dieng Constructs a Bridge Between St. Louis and Saint-Louis

Sister Cities: Artist Modou Dieng Constructs a Bridge Between St. Louis and Saint-Louis

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Rikki Byrd November 21, 2019

In the opening pages of the exhibition catalog for “ Saint-Louis to St. Louis: City on the River Meets River City,” there is a sepia-tone, postcard-like photograph of the Le Pont Faidherbe, a road bridge that runs over the Senegal River in West Africa. The bridge looks oddly reminiscent of bridges in St. Louis, Missouri, that run over the Mississippi River. The connecting arch-like domes over the span of Le Pont Faidherbe bear a resemblance to the McKinley Bridge; if one were to imagine Le Pont Faidherbe inverted, they might see a slight similarity to St. Louis’ Eads Bridge.

These bridges—and the bodies of water they span—serve as the point of departure for Modou Dieng, the curator for “Saint-Louis to St. Louis.” Having learned during his brief stint in St. Louis, Missouri, that Saint-Louis, Senegal, is its only African sister city, Dieng wanted to create a conversation between the two through visual art.

Years later, the show—currently on view at Barrett Barrera Projects in the Central West End, through a collaboration with Blackpuffin—has come to fruition, creating a narrative of visual works from the mid-20th century to the present by a handful of artists who were either born in Saint-Louis, have lived there or are simply inspired by the city’s impressively rich cultural life and aesthetics.

Dieng shared his conceptualization of the exhibition with Guided: St. Louis, culminating in the nascent idea to one day mount a show that includes works by artists from Saint-Louis and St. Louis side by side in order to maintain the bridges that continue to allow movement in each city and anticipate and inspire artistic movement between the two—the powerful thesis that already impressively undergirds the current show.

1/5 Guided: I know the idea has been percolating for a while. Can you talk about what inspired the exhibit? Well, what inspired the exhibition is the fact that I am from Saint-Louis, Senegal. Michael Behle from Paul Artspace told me that St. Louis, Missouri, and Saint-Louis, Senegal, are sister cities. I was in Senegal for the Dakar Biennale and I was thinking about how to create a conversation between the two countries in terms of art and culture. Many of the artists there are emerging. There is a renaissance right now happening. The way it’s happening in African American arts, it’s happening in African art and culture. So, I was like, OK, if anybody would do a show that reflects one city to another one, it would be Saint-Louis to St. Louis because I know both places.

I talked to Susan [Barrett] about it, and she was like, “Are you kidding me? This is perfect.” So I went traveling to Senegal and Saint-Louis and looking at art that is coming from there, mainly artists from there, artists who live there and artists who are inspired by the city. All three together become a sort of window into Saint-Louis culture and Saint-Louis fashion and Saint-Louis arts. I compartmentalized it with photography, sculpture, painting, mixed media, fashion and lifestyle.

Guided: You were born in Saint-Louis, Senegal, and you lived in St. Louis, Missouri, briefly before moving to Chicago. What things stood out to you? I wouldn’t say I lived there [St. Louis] because I was there for six months and was mostly traveling. I didn’t really get the chance to know the roots of the city or know the neighborhoods. I got a chance to know people like you and Shabez [Jamal] and Kahlil [Irving]. It has a lot of history with, like, jazz music. So I got to discover the culture. I got to discover the emerging scene within the culture of art and fashion, which I found totally exciting and beautiful, and I wanted to be a part of it.

2/5 I thought that there would be a nice conversation going on, especially knowing the history of Ferguson and Black Lives Matter, and knowing that there is work to be done to heal this community and bring more conversation and open a conversation between people in Africa and people in St. Louis. That was actually my first time, on a daily basis, to interact with an African American culture—because Portland, where I was [before St. Louis], doesn’t have a big African American community—and also a vibrant community that is contributing to conversation.

Guided: You mentioned the emerging arts in Saint-Louis, Senegal. In the six months that you were in St. Louis, did you notice similarities between the emerging arts scene in Saint-Louis and St. Louis? There isn’t. There’s similarities between the histories of both places having the same name. My focus wasn’t really to find something similar but to actually create a conversation, and that could be about art, that could be about fashion, that could be about African history, that could be about economic finances, that could be about volunteering. But it was more about these two cities having the same name and coming from a French perspective and being able to see each other and talk to each other.

Guided: Can you tell me about how you selected some of the artists? Can you also highlight two or three works that you feel really speak to the mission of how you curated the show? I wanted the show to be a window on the domestic life of Senegal. For example, if you look at the catalogue, I wanted to make the people in St. Louis, Missouri, be able to just see a little bit of what it’s like in Saint-Louis, Senegal, because you are bringing an exhibition that is speaking about a city and you want them to visualize it. Saint-Louis is the birthplace for African photography. The first photographers in Africa were from Saint-Louis, and they were trained by the French to photograph the French army during the late 19th century. It 3/5 becomes the birthplace of black people carrying a camera. Outside of the U.S., of course. So I wanted to really highlight the domestic aspect of Saint-Louis, because it has a strong tradition in terms of coming from a French colonized city. A lot of the domestic life is very mixed, Creole, like New Orleans. Imagine the French Quarter in New Orleans in Africa.

Guided: I remember when we met before, you said something about going to New Orleans and you said it was so similar. Right. Exactly. It’s kind of like the same lifestyle in terms of the carnival, the music, the Creole culture, the fashion. Everything is out on the street. But also it’s an African city. It’s an old African city. So the way I selected the artists was to lean on photography and painting, but also people who were just famous from Saint-Louis, Senegal. I had to put them in the show. Like, for example, Serigne Mbaye Camara is a famous sculptor from Senegal and he was born in Saint-Louis. You have also Abdoukarim Fall, who is a great painter and also did work on the colonial architecture in Saint-Louis. And Manel Ndoye who—he’s not from Saint-Louis—but he did a very strong series of work about a very popular tradition of dance from Saint-Louis, Senegal. He is from the same setting, but in Dakar. Also, Adama Sylla, who is 80 years old, and he was in the second generation of photographers from Saint-Louis. He’s been taking pictures of his neighborhood since 1961. So I showed his late ’60s-1970s work.

Guided: The exhibition right now only features artists from Saint-Louis, Senegal, but is there a goal to do a show with artists from St. Louis, Missouri, and Saint-Louis, Senegal? Yeah. Definitely. I want this to be a bridge that both sides can cross. Now, we did this show from Saint-Louis, Senegal, to St. Louis, Missouri, and I hope that we can do a show of St.

4/5 Louis, Missouri, in Senegal. I don’t know what it would it take, what it would require and who’s going to be in the show. It’s to be determined. But yes, it would be nice if I bring a show from Missouri to Senegal.

Guided: Do you have any plans to show the work from both cities side by side? That’s a good idea. I haven’t thought about it. You need to create that sort of platform, where they can both communicate and work together. I’m on the advisory board for Paul Artspace, so I have an idea with Michael [Behle] to start a residency in Missouri and Senegal of artists from both places. That kind of platform can create a conversation.

“Saint-Louis to St. Louis: City on the River Meets River City, ” the first exhibition at Barrett Barrera Projects’ new state-of-the-art project space in the Central West End, runs through Dec. 21. In a global artistic exchange of diaspora and hybridity, the exhibition features the work of artists Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, Serigne Mbaye Camara, Rama Diaw, Modou Dieng, Abdoukarim Fall, Manel Ndoye, Jarmo Pikkujamsa, Djibril Sy, Adama Sylla, Sara de la Villejegu and Malick Welli.

Images by Virginia Harold, courtesy of Barrett Barrera Projects.

This post is brought to you in part by the mentioned organization. Thank you for supporting the companies that keep ALIVE and Guided growing.

5/5 New Gallery Show Connects St. Louis To Its Senegalese Sister City, Saint-Louis

news.stlpublicradio.org/show/st-louis-on-the-air/2019-10-16/new-gallery-show-connects-st-louis-to-its-senegalese- sister-city-saint-louis

St. Louis on the Air St. Louis Public Radio | By Lara Hamdan

Published October 16, 2019 at 4:14 PM CDT

Modou Dieng

Senegalese artist Modou Dieng's work titled "la rue du fleuve" references scenes near his childhood home in Saint-Louis, Senegal.

Thousands of miles across the Atlantic — 7,505 miles, to be exact — is a city St. Louisans can feel a connection with. In the West African country of Senegal, there is a bustling coastal arts city named Saint-Louis. Known to locals as Ndar, it’s the oldest colonial city on Africa’s western coast.

A new contemporary art exhibition opening this week at Barrett Barrera Projects in the Central West End surveys the art scene in Senegal’s Saint-Louis — and notes the parallels between the two cities named for St. Louis the King.

The exhibition is called “Saint-Louis to St. Louis: The City on the River meets River City.”

On Wednesday’s St. Louis on the Air, its curator, Modou Dieng, joined host Sarah Fenske to share insights about his native city.

1/5 Credit Lara Hamdan | St. Louis Public Radio

Modou Dieng is a Chicago-based artist born in Saint-Louis, Senegal. He explores the symbolic and mythological power of pop culture icons through mixed media and hybrid materials.

“To me, it’s about, first, starting a conversation, because I think the two cities have a lot to give to each other. Today in this global market and in this global atmosphere, we are trying to basically build a bridge over the Atlantic,” Dieng said.

Through paintings, a fashion show and other media, the exhibit will showcase Senegalese artists and designers. Dieng added that in the future, he hopes to facilitate St. Louis, Missouri, artists showcasing their work in Senegal.

The opening reception for “Saint-Louis to St. Louis” will take place from 5 to 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 17, at Barrett Barrera Projects.

The conversation included St. Louis resident Sofi Seck. The native of Senegal detailed her efforts to open a school for girls in Saint-Louis through her Missouri-based company Expedition Subsahara.

Listen to the full discussion here:

2/5

CULTURE

By Devon Van Houten Maldonado 23rd April 2019

Devon Van Houten Maldonado asks artists and curators to imagine the changes and trends that will influence the art world in the next two decades.

The future may be uncertain, but some things are undeniable: climate change, shifting demographics, geopolitics. The only guarantee is that there will be changes, both wonderful and terrible. It’s worth considering how artists will respond to these changes, as well as what purpose art serves, now and in the future.

Reports suggest that by 2040 the impacts of human-caused climate change will be unescapable, making it the big issue at the centre of art and life in 20 years’ time. Artists in the future will wrestle with the possibilities of the post-human and post-Anthropocene – artificial intelligence, human colonies in outer space and potential doom.

The identity politics seen in art around the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements will grow as environmentalism, border politics and migration come even more sharply into focus. Art will become increasingly diverse and might not ‘look like art’ as we expect. In the future, once we’ve become weary of our lives being visible online for all to see and our privacy has been all but lost, anonymity may be more desirable than fame. Instead of thousands, or millions, of likes and followers, we will be starved for authenticity and connection. Art could, in turn, become more collective and experiential, rather than individual.

A more inclusive art world?

“I imagine art in 20 years will be much more fluid than it is today,” curator Jeffreen M Hayes tells BBC Culture, “in the sense of boundaries being collapsed between media, between the kinds of art that is labelled art, in the traditional sense. I also see it being much more representative of our growing and shifting demographics, so more artists of colour, more female-identified works, and everything in between.”

The future of art is black – Modou Dieng

Hayes’s exhibition AfriCOBRA: Nation Time was recently selected as an official collateral event of the 2019 Venice Biennale which opens in May, bringing the work of a previously little-known and uncelebrated group of black artists working on Chicago’s south side in the 1960s to an international audience.

“I’m hopeful that in 20 years, as art shifts and artists help to lead the way, that institutions begin to be, not just intentional, but more thoughtful about the different ways that art can be presented, and that would require a more inclusive, not just curatorial staff, but also leadership,” she says. Senegalese artist and curator Modou Dieng tells BBC Culture “the future of art is black.” Today, African, African-American, Afro-European, and Afro-Latin art is trending globally, marked by an opening to African diaspora artists working with discourses beyond the black body and colonialism. Black abstraction, curating and performance are all centre stage. Growing up in a newly independent Senegal looking for an identity as a people, “we saw migration as the solution, not the problem,” says Dieng, whose works are included in the US Department of State’s permanent collection. Senegalese curator and artist Modou Dieng – seen in 2009 – tells BBC Culture “the future of art is black” (Credit: Getty)

The change anticipated by Hayes and Dieng does not translate to the new emergence of black, Latino, LGBT, outsider, feminist and ‘other’ art, as these movements have long histories of their own. But it merely means that they will be further embraced by the markets and the institutions, which will themselves become more diverse and informed by histories outside the dominant, Eurocentric, Western canon.

Activism Activism-art campaigns are indicative of shifting trends toward accountability, also revealing of entrenched power dynamics and dirty money in the art world. Decolonize This Place, an amorphous group of artists and activists describing themselves as an “action-oriented movement centring around Indigenous struggle, Black liberation, free Palestine, global wage workers and de-gentrification,” are currently undertaking protests inside New York’s Whitney Museum of Art against vice chairman Warren B Kanders, who owns a company that manufactures tear-gas used against oppressed people around the world.

The artist-activists of the Decolonize This Place movement aren’t the first in history to be disruptive, usually to the dismay of institutions. During World War One a group of artists calling themselves the Dada started to stage disruptive, experimental interventions as a protest against the senseless violence of the war. The Dada was considered the most radical avant-garde movement in the early 20th Century, followed by the Fluxus artists in the 1960s, who similarly sought to employ shock and senselessness in order to change artistic and social perceptions. The legacy of these performative movements continues in works by artists like Paul McCarthy and Robert Mapplethorpe. "Shock functions as part of the movements' attempt to change society," writes Dorothée Brill in Shock and the Senseless in Dada and Fluxus. "This endeavour will be shown to as being linked to the artists' rejection of the idea that artistic production must make sense and be meaningful." Activists Decolonize This Place protest inside New York’s Whitney Museum (Credit: Getty)

“I hope that art will continue to be a space for formal innovation, radical experimentation and lawlessness,” curator Chris Sharp tells BBC Culture, “in order to continue to evade the instrumentalisation of capitalism, politics and ideology, carving out a space for neither right nor wrong thinking, but rather thought which can be neither qualified nor quantified.” When we spoke, Sharp was in Milan for the art fair with his Mexico City gallery, Lulu, before traveling to Venice, where he is co- curating the New Zealand Pavilion for the May Biennale with Dr Zara Stanhope and artist Dane Mitchell.

Those who believe in ‘art for art’s sake’ might say that art as an unquantifiable force must remain outside social or ideological norms, or risk becoming something else. Some experts like Sharp argue that it’s a slippery slope when art starts leaning toward activism because that’s just not the point. (Though the curator also argues that it's impossible for art to be apolitical). It's a viewpoint committed to art as a force on its own, a process of radical experimentation that results in an artwork, one of many along a line of inquiry, not a means to illustrate an end or impregnate an object with meaning. No conclusions should be drawn about art, present or future because it is the force against universalism, which must be interrupted by artists, as if to tell the world “wake up!”

Painting is (not) dead In two decades’ time, it will have been 200 years since Paul Delaroche exclaimed “painting is dead”, and there are reasonable arguments against how relevant the medium is as a tool of the avant-garde. Delaroche’s original idea has been repeated and recycled endlessly as new mediums have worked their way into and out of the spotlight, but painting isn’t likely to be going anywhere.

In 20 years, the market might not be very different than it is today – dominated by modern painting

Painting sales are still the major driver of auction houses, art fairs and galleries, dominating all record- breaking art sales. Modern paintings made during the first half of the 20th Century continue to hold steady as the most desirable and most expensive artworks on the market. Nine of the 10 most expensive paintings ever sold were made between 1892 and 1955, the only exception being a newly discovered Leonardo da Vinci from between 1490 and 1519, which fetched an extraordinary $450.3m (£341m) at auction, making it the most expensive artwork ever sold. Every painting on the list was made by a white man, however, which doesn’t paint a very hopeful picture for equality. In 20 years, the market might not be very different than it is today – dominated by modern painting – but perhaps works from the second half of the 20th Century, including more women and minority artists, will begin to accrue value: in 2017 a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (1984), set a new record for the most expensive contemporary artwork sold at auction for $110.4m (£85.4m). Last year the market for contemporary African and African diaspora also set records, with Kerry James Marshall fetching an astounding $21.1m for his painting Past Times (1997), a new record for living African-American artist. Multi-futurism

Maite Borjabad, curator of architecture and design at The Art Institute of Chicago, says that we should be “ready for things to happen that you cannot even anticipate.” In other words, we can’t expect to predict one future, but instead should prepare for many futures.

I think that the future is multiple and plural, it’s not a future - Maite Borjabad

A museum is not just a place for things to exist, but it’s a platform for other voices to be heard. So according to Borjabad, the curator is a mediator. Through commissions, for example, the museum isn’t just a place to display art, but also an “incubator of ideas” for producing new work. “I think that the future is multiple and plural, it’s not a future,” she tells BBC Culture.

“Cultural institutions and collections are highly political and have perpetuated and consolidated a very dogmatic understanding of history,” she continues. “That’s why collections like the Art Institute are the perfect material to help us rewrite histories, plural, rather than just a history.”

In the year 2040, art might not look like art (unless it’s a painting), but it will look like everything else, reflecting zeitgeists as multitudinous and diverse as the artists themselves. There will be artist-activists leading political upheaval; there will be formal experimenters exploring new mediums and spaces (even in outer space), and there will be strong markets in Latin America, Asia and Africa. So in the world of culture at least, the West may find itself playing catch up. Mar 19, 2018,05:01am EDT

How Modou Dieng Is Changing The Oregon Art Scene Addie Wagenknecht Arts

Detail of New Feelings installation, work by Hassan Hajjaj MARIO GALLUCI

The advantage of having many concepts of home, a sort of placelessness is how often our experiences bring forward others who share the same definition of place. Modou Dieng’s lineage and perception of the world is without question part of and reflected in his curatorial practice. The group exhibition New Feelings, opened in Portland Oregon in February, ”there is a power in looking,” he said from his studio in Portland. “How do we rearrange the system of representation so that there is also power in being seen? I wanted to exhibit photography from a strictly diasporic perspective. Africans have always been photographed, documented- but it’s fascinating to see what we see when the position shifts from being the subject to the artist.” The exhibition is composed of six artists, entirely photographers from the diaspora. The precipice of the show, never mind a show of entirely African and African American artists, is an almost totally void concept in the Pacific Northwest, but there is a revolution going on, and it is starting in the Northwest. Thanks to Modou and galleries like Mariane Ibrahim who represent artists like Ayana V. Jackson among others, the proverbial (and let me say it- expected if not boring) same five white men shown by the same five institutions is changing and fast. “To see yourself free has a sort of validation- but African photographers especially are still very much conflated to the body- affirmation, documentation, reporting,” he remarked. And like any strong curatorial practice, his exhibition aligns with the zeitgeist of politics as much as it does art, race, society and everything else.

Detail from New Feelings, work by artist Mickalene Thomas MARIO GALLUCI

Partial Installation view of New Feelings MARIO GALLUCI So often artists respond to crisis by producing portraiture. It is a way of expression when the artist needs to reflect onto the world with the self as subject. And in this post-Obama, pre-who knows what tomorrow, never mind futures, the show is full of embodiment's of reflection. “I wanted to put the works into a conversational space around the medium and our culture. How artists express themselves using various mediums, to create a voice for that medium,” he added. Portland and the Pacific Northwest have never really been seriously considered as part of the contemporary conversation in larger hotbeds like London or New York. Contemporary art has traditionally always referenced pushing perception, definitions and boundaries only in places like New York but with the help of the Internet, an interconnectedness, and perhaps placelessness, but more importantly- Modous vision, he is changing this. The show even manages to transcend geography, as if in a conversation across oceans, the MACAAL, Museum of African Contemporary Art opened in late February in Marrakesh with their debut exhibition, Africa is No Island. The shows despite a lack of proximity feel in conversation with each other even being 5719 miles apart.

Exterior Installation shot of New Feelings, work by Rodrigo Valenzuela MARIO GALLUCI

If New Feelings had opened in New York or LA, I am sure we would still be having this conversation but perhaps much later. The advantage of the Northwest art scene is people are still learning, people are still not afraid of asking questions, you do not need to ask permission from the established donor cliques- collectors are more curious and exploratory. They aren’t all stuck on the return investment of their balloon dogs. These communities of inquiry work only to Modou’s advantage—the shows complexities are not lost on the viewer but rather function as a stepping stone into a realization and manifestation of the large canon of contemporary art and black artists who are leading it.

Modous upcoming exhibitions include Short Walks To Freedom in collaboration with The Civics Platform For Freedoms, founded by artist Hank Willis Thomas opening at Project Plus Gallery in St Louis Missouri, Oct 19 2018. New Feelings is open until April 14th at PNCA Center for Contemporary Culture in Portland, Oregon. Check out my website.

Addie Wagenknecht Oregon Arts Commission

oregonartscommission.org/fellowship-profile/modou-dieng

2014 Fellowship Recipient

Dieng_ModouPhotoSabinaSamiee_web.jpg

Modou Dieng

Photo Sabina Poole

The material of Modou Dieng’s works, both literally and figuratively, is drawn from a sensitivity to popular culture—spanning music to fashion—as it once informed the imagination of this Senegalese young man and as it now informs Dieng’s reality in America today. Often these references are wholly explicit in his materials which have included black vinyl records, found photos and neckties. You will not be alone if you see in his work echoes of American artists in a pop vein from Rauschenberg to Warhol.

From the time that he arrived in Portland, Modou Dieng has never been satisfied with simply making art. He has had an active curatorial practice as well as playing cultural ambassador between Portland and places like Dakar, Antwerp, and San Francisco. He’s an assistant professor at Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) who yearly takes students to Europe or to Dakar for a Global Studios immersion experience.

For five years, from 2007-2012 Dieng ran the independent arts space Worksound, hosting more than 50 exhibitions as well as performances, readings, talks and experimental music concerts. Unique in Portland for its broad ranging programming—poetry to punk to painting—in a scrappy Southeast space, Worksound was, as Dieng has called it a “lab of ideas and curatorial projects.” In addition to regular exhibitions of regional artists, Dieng brought curators and artists from the Bay Area, from Europe and from Australia. And Worksound hosted a residency project for artists and writers, as well.

Once the Worksound space reverted to artists’ studios, Dieng began work with a small group on a much more ambitious project: the NOW Portland Triennale. As initially described, NOW would bring six weeks of exhibitions and programming by an

1/2 international slate of artists. The idea has been to bring a curator from each of a handful of countries to curate shows of their contemporaries and countrymen and women. The strategy Dieng laid out was to show international work in Portland that United States arts audiences could see nowhere else in the country. The project was announced last year with a symposium planned for this year. The organizers are planning the first Triennale for 2016.

Dieng has been called “one of the most internationally connected artists in Portland” for good reason. Born in Saint-Louis, Senegal, Dieng received his undergraduate degree from Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts in Senegal and his MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. He has exhibited in Milan, Madrid, Johannesburg, Paris, Brussels and Los Angeles.

Last year Dieng was curated into eMERGING: Visual Art & Music in a Post-Hip-Hop Era at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in New York. And last year, he collaborated with a PNCA alumni, Devon A. VanHouten-Maldonado, on An Interactive Installation at Linfield College based on a history of heroes and antiheroes in Mexico and Senegal. The pair will present collaborative work at Distjecta’s Portland2014 Biennial.

This spring, Dieng co-curated with Mack McFarland an exhibition of work by influential Belgian artist Luc Tuymans at PNCA’s Feldman Gallery + Project Space.

2/2 Modou Dieng and the Worksound Moment by Mack McFarland

What makes an art scene? To start, a group of artists, like- minded about aesthetic and moral issues, spend time together, experiencing things they and others create and digesting those experiences together. Next, an audience of musicians and poets, doctors and lawyers, shows up to events; they dive into the art and the conversation around it, sometimes purchase work, and come the following month with a friend or two. We have seen such convergences in The Factory, the L.A. Woman’s Building, Vancouver’s Western Front, Fort Thunder in Providence, and Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room, to name a few. In Oregon, Ditch Projects in Springfield and Artworks Gallery in Corvallis come to mind, and Portland Image courtesy of Worksound International of course has had its share. Of these, one space stands out for bringing together artists and audiences from multiple scenes—Worksound. Over the past decade, Worksound has become the hub of a dynamic and diverse community of cultural producers, presenting over fifty exhibitions; providing practice space for bands as well as an office for a record label; involving some twelve hundred artists, musicians, filmmakers, and poets. Month after month, the unpaid organizers of Worksound have attracted audiences of all ages with original art and new live music, trending in the footsteps of Portland’s X-Ray Café in the 1990s and the various events staged in the artist-occupied Oak Street Building.

The experiment began with the chance meeting in 2006 of Tim Janchar and Modou Dieng at a Barry McGee exhibition at Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco. Janchar, an artist and emergency-room physician, was in the city from Portland that weekend visiting a friend who, like Dieng, was finishing an MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute. Along with his brother, Mark, Janchar was issuing recordings on their Hovercraft label and running a gallery in the Everett Street Lofts of the same name. Dieng was making paintings inspired by his experience as a Gen-Xer in Senegal, his assemblages of vinyl records, neckties, glitter, and spray paint evoking the kaleidoscopic nightlife of Dakar. Janchar was excited by the work; he had been thinking about how to mix audiences for music and visual art. When he invited Dieng to exhibit at Hovercraft, the artist was hesitant, later explaining, “I didn’t even know where Oregon was.”1

Dieng spent a week in Portland that summer. These were boom times for the United States economy, the Great Recession was still two years away, and the city’s art scene was abuzz. The Everett Street Lofts were humming with activity: along with Hovercraft, there was Tilt, co-founded by Jenene Nagy and Josh Smith, Genuine Imitation, Rake, Sugar, Vorpal Space, Ogle, and Sequential Gallery which continues to this day. Nearby was Motel, started

OREGON VISUAL ARTS ECOLOGY PROJECT www.oregonvisualarts.org | March, 2017 by Jennifer Armbrust. Some work sold, but the galleries’ more important function was at the heart of First Thurs- days’ experimental art scene. On First Fridays, the East Side was still blossoming with Ruth Ann Brown’s New American Art Union, Laurel Gitlen’s Small A Projects, and Newspace Center for Photography. Music venues flourished too: Backspace and Holocene were three years old, Slabtown was going strong, The Know was about to get a liquor license and The Artistery and Dekum Manor were the house venues not to be missed. Commercial galleries were expanding. The DeSoto Building renovation project was underway, soon to house four of the region’s long-running art spaces, Augen, Froelick, and Blue Sky galleries, and the Museum of Contemporary Craft. Elizabeth Leach Gallery, PDX Contemporary, and Pulliam Deffenbaugh had relocated around Northwest 9th Avenue and Flanders Street. Although Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s founder, Kristy Edmunds, left for Melbourne, the Portland Art Museum, having just added the Jubitz Center for Modern and Contemporary Art, was about to hire a new director, Brian Ferriso. Tom Potter was mayor, no one spoke yet of a housing crisis, rents were still cheap enough, and one could find a studio without too much trouble.

It was this last opportunity that brought Dieng back to Portland. He was living in New York but wanted to return to the West Coast. “I was looking for . . . a scene to be a part of,” he recalls, “and a studio to make work in, and my time in Portland . . . kept coming back to me, so I called Tim to see if he would want to start a space with me.” Janchar agreed, as long as Dieng would take the lead. They opened Worksound at 820 SE Alder Street, in Left to right: Tim Janchar, Modou Dieng, Mark Janchar, Portland, 10 a former manufacturing facility, announcing their inten- December 2016 (photo: Alex Bissonnette) tion “to cultivate experimental and innovative contemporary art … collaborate with artists, writers, musicians in the production of new work that challenges boundaries of conventional practices, while encouraging broad public appreciation and access to arts and contemporary culture.”2 Worksound would be a place “where different disci- plines and audiences converge and cross-pollinate, through curatorial innovation and depth of programming in diverse media.” Dieng was attempting to create something he experienced in Africa, “where everyone,” he recalls, “under the capital A of artist, all the artists can get together.”

To a large extent this is what happened. Worksound, as they hoped the name would imply, blended a visual art and music venue. The Janchar brothers’ Hovercraft Records operated out of Worksound for two years while only about half the 3,000 square-foot space was open to the public. The other half was renovated as money became available, functioning in the interim as studio space for Dieng and others. By 2009, 95 percent of the facility was in use for art and music shows; the rest consisted of an office and two rehearsal spaces for bands. The garage-rock sensation The Hunches were one of the first to practice at Worksound, followed by the psychedelic pop-infused Nurses as well as the drum-heavy Explode into Colors, voted best new band of 2009 by Willamette Week. Musi- cal curation by Worksound was strong, starting with the avant-noise group Smegma, whose sometime vocalist, rock critic Richard Meltzer, was on stage in 2009. Other highlights included the L.A. noise duo No Age, Portland legend Pierced Arrows, and Vancouver punk band White Lung. Few other artist-run alternative spaces in those years engaged as much with national and international artists while at the same time showcasing local talent. As Dieng put it, “We worked within a global agenda, although 70 percent of the shows were regional artists and directed to a local audience.” 3 This emphasis, coupled with the music programing, placed Worksound in a unique position in the city’s art scene, providing audiences with new art, and artists with an opportunity to expand their networks. One example was the 2008 exhibition Re- verse Reality, Worksound’s collaboration with curator Selina Ho, which provided a one-month residency for four emerging Hong Kong artists to create and show new work informed by their experiences in Portland. Also included in their exhibition were drawings by Portland-based Samantha Wall. Three years later, the exhibition You’ll never walk alone, curated by Belgian artist Vanessa Van Obberghen, featured works by European and Af- rican artists: the duo Carla Arocha and Stephane Schraenen, Kris Fierens, David Gheron Tretiakoff, Moshekwa Langa, Alassane Babylas Ndiaye, Roberto Dewulf-Ortega, and David Wauters. Six of the artists came to Portland for the exhibition, visiting classrooms and studios across the city, and three of them have returned to Portland to exhibit again. Spatial Personality opened in July 2012, co-curated by Dieng and San Francisco-based designer Jesse Siegel, featuring four artists from the Bay Area and four from Portland. Dieng’s strategy— partnering with a curator deeply involved in a certain subsection of another city’s art scene—foregrounds similarities in method and thinking among artists in different localities, always with the hope that some lasting connection can be forged with artists and curators in proximity to one and other.

Following the close of Spatial Personality, the space at 820 SE Alder was transformed into Worksound Studios. Several factors played into this shift: Dieng had spent five years con- centrating on Worksound while teaching full time at Pacific Northwest College of Art; he needed to focus on his studio practice. More- over, the realities of funding these sorts of projects, which tend to fall outside regional govern- mental and private foundation support, had to be considered. As Dieng phrased it, “The di- lemma of creating a space is that you’re going to put your money into it, and then at some Image courtesy of Worksound International point you will go broke.” Worksound Studios has housed several artists’ studios as well as two rehearsal rooms for bands. Rents remain among the cheapest in Portland, at a time (2015-2016) when studio rents rose 19 percent and housing rents 13 percent, with a slim stock whose vacancy rate hovers at about 3.5 percent.4 These are the conditions in what some term “The New Portland,” the city to which Dieng’s co-curator on Spatial Personality relocated in 2014.

Like Dieng, Siegel grew up outside the United States, in his case Mexico. In San Francisco, he had co-founded the Basement, a collective of artists, designers, and an art-book publisher, Colpa Press, which occupied a sub- divided basement space. He and Dieng together set out to make use of their growing international connections and the notable influx to the Northwest of artists from abroad. Thus began Worksound International (WI), whose programs are intended “to enable diverse international practices [and] to create social engagement between international artists and local communities.”5 Since 2014, WI has organized fourteen exhibitions in the newly

OREGON VISUAL ARTS ECOLOGY PROJECT www.oregonvisualarts.org | March, 2017 built-out Worksound space of 150 square feet, the rest still devoted to art and music studios which help fund the project. Other WI exhibitions, in Frankfurt and Mexico City, have presented Oregon artists in an international context. Additionally, WI-produced videos pair exhibiting artists with local artists for conversation around their work, process, and respective art communities.

As I readied this essay for publication, the owner of the property at 820 SE Alder was seeking a buyer, and Worksound announced its closing on 13 December 2016. The warehouse will join the growing list of art spaces torn down. Dieng is developing a roving model, with plans for pop-ups in cities such as New York, Chicago, and Antwerp. This is the destiny of many artist-run projects and should not be lamented as inherently bad; however, if the fate of small galleries or studio complexes is again and again determined by real-estate market forces, then we need to ask how we support a living art scene in the face of an economic system that allows these spaces of extraordinary experimentation and community to exist just long enough to gentrify the neighborhood—then price themselves out. Surely a question for another time, yet it is the question of our time.

1. All quotes from Modou Dieng are from a personal interview with the author, Portland, Oregon, 12 September, 2016. 2. Modou Dieng, Mark Janchar, and Tim Janchar, quoted in Lisa Radon, “820 SE Alder,” Untitled, 24 October 2016, http://untitled.pnca.edu/articles/show/6006, accessed 23 December 2016, and in the next sentence, ibid. 3. Dieng quoted in ibid. 4. Fiona McCann, “Can Portland Artists Survive the City’s New Gilded Age?,” Portland Monthly, 1 March 2016; Luke Hammill, “New Report: Rents Rose 13 Percent Annually, But New Supply Slowed Price Growth,” The Oregonian, 26 April 2016. 5. Worksound International, http://www.worksoundinternational.com/visit/, accessed 23 December 2016.

Artist Mack McFarland is Director of the Center for Contemporary Art & Culture at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, where he has worked as curator since 2006. Past projects have included commissioned new works from tactical media practitioners Critical Art Ensemble, Eva and Franco Mattes, and Disorientalism. Among exhibitions he has curated for PNCA are Luc Tuymans: Graphic Works—Kristalnacht to Technicolor; a group exhibition marking John Cage’s centennial, Happy Birthday: A Celebration of Chance and Listening; and a comprehensive look at the process of comics journalist Joe Sacco. Currently McFarland is working on exchange exhibitions between Portland and other cities to create dialogue among cultural producers. One such project, Costumes, Reverence, and Forms: A Philadelphia/Portland Mixer at Vox Populi in Philadelphia (6 January through 19 February 2017), includes work by Portland artists Avantika Bawa, Tabitha Nicolai, Jess Perlitz, and Ralph Pugay.

This essay was edited by Sue Taylor, and is among a series of essays commissioned for the Visual Arts Ecology Project by The Ford Family Foundation and Oregon Arts Commission with Editors Stephanie Snyder, John and Anne Hauberg Curator and Director, The Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery; and Sue Taylor, Associate Dean, College of the Arts and Professor of Art History, Portland State University. The commissioning institutions share a goal to strengthen the visual arts ecology in Oregon, and a key interest of increasing the volume of critical writing on art in our region.

ART REVIEW | ‘FLOW' Out of Africa, Whatever Africa May Be By Holland Cotter April 4, 2008

Afropolitanism is the modish tag for new work made by young African artists both in and outside Africa. What unites the artists is a shared view of Africa, less as a place than as a concept; a cultural force, one that runs through the world the way a gulf stream runs through an ocean: part of the whole, but with its own tides and temperatures.

This idea, or something like it, lies behind “Flow” at the Studio Museum in Harlem, a fine- textured survey of 20 artists who, with a few exceptions, were born in Africa after 1970 but who now live in Europe or the United States.

Before the 1980s contemporary African artists had virtually no presence in the mainstream Euro-American art world. And on the rare occasions they were admitted to its precincts, they were required to show clear evidence of Africanness Africanness as gauged by Western standards, that is in their work, like a visa prominently displayed.

Multiculturalism, whatever its deficiencies, began to change this situation. It exposed art-world apartheid for what it was and forced open some long-locked gates. Not only did artists once excluded by color and class gain entry, they were also granted certain options as to how they might appear there. They could wrap themselves in evidence of their origins, or wear that evidence lightly, or not at all, the first option being preferred by the market.

The artists in “Flow” choose among these options, which means the show has no essential look, though there are broad patches of formal common ground. A lot of what’s here is based on an aesthetic of assemblage and fragmentation, the piecing together or taking apart of materials and ideas, including art-historical precedents.

Latifa Echakhch, born in Morocco and now living in France and Switzerland, has created her own version of Richard Serra’s “Splash” pieces from the 1960s. Rather than throw molten lead against a wall as Mr. Serra did, she throws Moroccan tea glasses. Their smashed remains lie on a gallery floor like the aftermath of an explosion. The piece neatly pinpoints the aggression of the original, an aggression with many metaphorical and political ramifications. But is Ms. Echakhch’s work topical? Polemical? Whimsical? Personal? It shifts from one to the other of these possibilities, which is, generally speaking, the “Flow” dynamic.

A second North African, Adel Abdessemed, Algerian by birth and now living in Paris, starts with many fragments and builds something from them. In this case the result is a toy-size model of the luxury liner Queen Mary II pieced together from cut-up bits of commercial packaging for olives and pepper, products exported from a continent that helped produce the immense wealth the ship represents.

Modou Dieng, a Senegalese artist now in the United States, evokes the exhilaration and misplaced optimism of 1960s Africa in his trio of wall ensembles made from secondhand vinyl records adorned with neckties and glitter. The names on the record labels range from Nat King Cole to Jimi Hendrix to Mos Def, suggesting that the high cultural moment, which also saw the ballooning of a market economy, extends into the present. It does. It’s there in the photographs of Nontsikelelo Veleko, known as Lolo, of fiercely chic young Johannesburgians, and in the heroically scaled portraits, culled from fashion magazines but resembling passport photos and mug shots, by Mustafa Maluka, a fine painter who was also one of the creators of africanhiphop.com, a music Web site and pop-cultural gold mine now a decade old.

The evidence of material richness continues where crafts traditions and modernist abstraction meet: in moss-green yarn reliefs by the Ethiopian artist Elias Sime; in Nicholas Hlobo’s suturelike stitched pieces based on Zulu needlework; and in enigmatic collages by Moshekwa Langa, one of several artists in the show who were also in “Africa Remix,” the grand contemporary survey in 2005 that never made it from Europe to the United States. A few artists revisit and revise primitivist myths of Africa. Thierry Fontaine does this in photographs of his own body transformed by layers of natural materials clay, sand, grass into a series of freakish sculptures. So does Joël Andrianomearisoa in a video called “The Stranger” (2007), in which a naked man evolves from prowling the forest to settling down in a nice, neat house. It’s worth noting that the “native” in this civilizing process appears to be white. The show, organized by Christine Y. Kim, associate curator at the Studio Museum, has a fair amount of video. A short piece called “Back to Me 1” by the South African artist Thando Mama gives a sense of what it’s like to be plugged into the world when the world isn’t plugged into you. A young man (the artist) sits transfixed in front of a television that is broadcasting inaccurate accounts from abroad of the Africa he knows.

Grace Ndiritu, born in London of African parents, and Michèle Magema, from Congo and now living in Paris, both address liabilities of Afropolitanism, past and present. In a striking film called “Au Bord de la Loire,” one of a small number of pieces in the show to address race directly, Ms. Magema reminds us that a few centuries ago her relationship to France might have been as a West Indies slave. Ms. Ndiritu acknowledges her conflicted connection to Africa now: despite her heritage, she’s a tourist there.

For tourists and transplants, can any place be real? Ananias Léki Dago, born in Ivory Coast, photographs the slums of Paris as if through the haze of dreams. Mounir Fatmi turns the immigrant’s life into an obstacle course of bright-colored horse-jumping poles. In a mural by Dawit L. Petros views of Tanzania, California and Canada all places where the artist has lived merge. Monrovia, the strife-wracked capital of Liberia, becomes the heavenly city in Trokon Nagbe’s gilded painting of it. And in studio photographs by Otobong Nkanga, Africa’s grand landscape is reduced to a tabletop diorama, a Lilliputian thing.

So Africa is unreal. Or maybe it’s super-real: a place, or state, where present and future coexist. Ms. Veleko’s street dandies look futuristic enough. So do Olalekan B. Jeyifous’s marvelous architectural models, like materializations of cyberspace; and the imaginary faces, half human, half something else, that peer out of darkness in Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s fictional portraits. Some of the eight portraits in the show are more interesting than others. Some are almost too dark to see; put them in an art fair and they’d vanish in the visual noise. Yet as a group they work; they wrap you in a substantial if elusive sensibility. To some degree the same can be said of “Flow.”

Whether, or how, that sensibility can be defined as “African” is a question. There is no single Africa, and the continent’s multiple elements change all the time, art included. No wonder artists are resisting the idea of Africanness as a fixed identity, or are trying to tailor it to something they can pick up or lay aside at will, and layer under and over other identities. At the same time they understand, it would seem, that their choices have weight. Postcolonial African art, wherever it is produced, is all but inseparable from politics. In Africa art has always played a social role, assumed moral status, a status that even physical distance almost none of the work in “Flow” has been shown in Africa can’t erase.

And so Afropolitanism, young and cool, comes with responsibilities. Maybe it is the awareness of this that gives a light-touch show heft and focus, a sense of thereness, geography-free but concrete, without which flow becomes drift.

“Flow” continues through June 29 at the Studio Museum in Harlem, 144 West 125th Street; (212) 864-4500, studiomuseum.org.