Willie Cole's Africa Remix: Trickster and “Tribe”

The Many Faces of Art in Global Africa

“…Not just Africa, but Slavery and The Middle Passage, particularly the Slave Ship Brookes rendered infamous in a graphic depiction of how to fit the most human bodies into the confined space of the ship's hold, have become tropes in the work of such diaspora and transnational artists today as American artists Radcliffe Bailey (Thompson, 2010) and Willie Cole (Borgatti, 2009), Anglo-Nigerian artist Sokari Douglas Camp (www.sokari.co.uk), and the Benin Republic's Romuald Hazoume (http://www.britishmuseum.org/about _us/news_and_press/press_releases/2007/la_bouche_du_roi.aspx). Numerous others are illustrated in Painter's classic work Creating Black Americans (2006, pp.20-41).…”

“…The names of many specific ethnic groups, including Nigerian ones, reminds people walking on it that African diasporic identity is multi-cultural. Willie Cole takes a playful stance with his -bicycle‖ Chi Wara, antelope headdresses made of recycled bicycle parts (Borgatti, 2009) but Renée Stout creates a more emotionally fraught series of sculptures using a cast of her own body festooned with packets of magical medicine and an abdominal cavity containing personal ancestral relicsinvoking her own ancestors for protection, following the methods of Kongo nkisi or magical medicine (McGaffey & Harris, 1993). 1 Nigerian-American Nnenna Okore represents a slightly different category of African American-one who knows without DNA testing her African ancestry, the child of Nigerian parents.…”