KONGO: POWER & MAJESTY
In 2015 Congo Love joined Congo Week and Congo in Harlem in partnership with The Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) which presented a special day at the opening of Congo Week VIII. The day involved a special tour for Congo Week participants of the Kongo: Power and Majesty exhibition at The MET. The tour was followed by a panel discussion of the exhibition featuring famed Congolese dancer and choreographer, Faustin Linyekula, and ended with a reception at Maysles Cinema in Harlem for their opening night.
Reviews
The Wall Street Journal
” This is part of the history that is evoked in the splendid, thought-provoking exhibition “Kongo: Power and Majesty.” The exhibition, organized by the Met’s Alisa Lagamma, has the great virtue of weaving together several narratives about Kongo art and society. It combines a vivid sense of history with works of art that embody a wide range of expression: from small, elegantly finished court sculptures to large, roughly textured manifestations of raw power. Along the way, the exhibition controverts two longstanding clichés: that Africans are a people “without history,” and that the canonical forms of African art allowed for little personal expression by individual artists.” JACK FLAM
The New York Times –
” The 15 sensational carved wood figures, standing like thorny trees in a grove, at the end of “Kongo: Power and Majesty” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, are examples of art of the rescuing kind. They are sculptural responses to a slow-motion emergency, one that shaped the history of the African continent and continues to resonate there today.”
The Guardian –
“A formidably rigorous and erudite exhibition looks at Kongo civilization across five centuries, unwinding any ‘primitivist’ stereotypes that still attend African art “Jason Farago
