Contemporary African Artists and the Pan-African Imaginary: Skunder Boghossian, Kwabena Ampofo-Anti, and Victor Ekpuk

The three artists discussed in this essay represent three generations of artists whose work exemplifies the accomplishments of African modernism and its enduring legacies as well as the complex conceptual, cultural, political, and ideological resources that constituted and continue to frame the twentieth-and twenty-first-century Pan-African artistic imaginary. Their work provides us the opportunity to measure and appreciate the various strategies developed by postcolonial African artists to define themselves as artistic subjects in an age of intense globalization, migration, and mobility of ideas and material cultures within and beyond ethnic, national, continental, and racial boundaries. Examined within this framework, the art of Boghossian, Ampofo-Anti, and Ekpuk tells us that Africa remains for its artists a site of powerful imaginaries, a historical place to which they are bound by ancestry, and an idea that elicits powerful aesthetic and symbolic action.