~In 1960, the Menil Foundation launched The Image of the Black in Western Art, a groundbreaking project that attempted to produce “an archaeological archive of racial relations, happy and unhappy.”John de Menil to Dr. Ola Balogun, 25 August 1972, Menil Archives, Menil...

The body, real or depicted, does not represent the limits of person-hood in Africa, but rather should be considered a temporary site, always in flux, for the articulation of the subject. It might be understood as the confluence of various spiritual and physical strands, from ancestral currents to an animating life force to individualized threads setting the destiny of the person whose body they...