Art World City: The Creative Economy of Artists and Urban Life in Dakar

By Joanna Grabski

“Insightful . . . should be on the bookshelf of anyone interested in contemporary art on the continent of Africa, its politics, its display, its economics.” —African Arts

Art World City focuses on contemporary art and artists in the city of Dakar, a famously thriving art metropolis in the West African nation of Senegal. Joanna Grabski illuminates how artists earn their livelihoods from the city’s resources, possibilities, and connections. She examines how and why they produce and exhibit their work and how they make an art scene and transact with art world mediators such as curators, journalists, critics, art lovers, and collectors from near and far. Grabski shows that Dakar-based artists participate in a platform that has a global reach. They extend Dakar’s creative economy and the city’s urban vibe into an “art world city.”

“In her fine-grained analysis, Joanna Grabski demonstrates the ways that the urban environment and the sites of art production, exhibition, and sale imbricate one another to constitute Dakar as an Art World City.” —Mary Jo Arnoldi, Curator, Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian

“A valuable addition to the anthropology of cities and of art worlds. It stretches and revises the notion of art world to include multiple scales, and illustrates how the city enables simultaneous engagement for artists with local, national, Pan-African, and global discourses and platforms.” —City & Society

“A beautiful book. The photographs, most of which are by the author, are stunning.” —College Art Association Reviews

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9780253026224

Book preview

INTRODUCTION:

DAKAR’S ART WORLD CITY

Within a few months of arriving for my first stay in Dakar in 1998, I had amassed an untidy stack of invitation cards to exhibition openings and other art events in various neighborhoods across the city. When I asked my new colleague Abdoulaye about these artistic events, he assured me that all of this was standard fare. "C’est normal, he told me in a tone of casual elegance. This is animation artistique in Dakar." My response vacillated between intrigue and bewilderment. Animation artistique? Although it was not entirely clear to me at that moment, his pithy explanation offered something of a revelation. These events were more than sites for artists to show their work or for a researcher to participate in her project. They were gathering sites where the city’s art scene—artists, journalists, critics, animateurs d’art, diplomats, and collectors—made itself visible.

My bewilderment was due mostly to the large number of artists and the impressive range of events. Based on what I had read in preparation for this trip, I had not expected this degree of activity. My preliminary research had impressed on me that I should expect little to no infrastructure for the arts because former president Léopold Sédar Senghor’s famously robust post-independence era subvention had come to an end when he left office in 1980. I assumed I would meet artists who were, at best, struggling to make, exhibit, and sell their art. I certainly did not expect to encounter an art scene animated within and, as I propose in this book, because of the city.

FIGURE 0.1. Cheikh Ndiaye, Blancheur Rigide Dérisoire en Opposition au Ciel, 2015. Mixed-media installation (wood, industrial paint) at the Venice Biennale, 2015. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

In the years since I initiated my research in Dakar, the city’s art scene has capitalized on another scale of visibility with increasing vigor. Dakar has come to be seen as one of the African continent’s premier sites for contemporary artistic expression and a critical node in an ever-globalizing art world. Along with the Dak’Art Biennale’s context of entrée for art world travelers to visit the city, intensified art world globalization in the 1990s had significant implications for artists in Dakar and Africa more generally. Whereas in the 1990s, the participation of Dakar-based artists in global art world platforms might have been described as emergent at best, in the twenty-first century many more artists from Dakar have been represented in blockbuster international exhibitions and high-profile biennales (biennial art exhibitions) outside Dakar.

A snapshot of artists’ participation in such events in 2015 makes this point: Cheikh Ndiaye and Fatou Kandé Senghor were featured at the Venice Biennale; Ndary Lo and Cheikh Niass had artwork in The Divine Comedy, originating at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main and traveling to the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution; Soly Cissé exhibited in São Paulo’s Museu Afro Brasil; El Hadji Sy was the subject of a retrospective solo exhibition at the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt; and Cheikh Ndiaye, Soly Cissé, and Omar Victor Diop participated in the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair in New York and London. Artists’ participation in exhibitions in Dakar and global art platforms exemplifies that the city’s contemporary creative economy is at once locally oriented and globally enmeshed. The productive interlacing of these two geospatial and analytical spheres—Dakar’s art scene and platforms designated as part of the global art world—is the subject of this book.

Focusing on the imbrication of the art scene in the city and the city in the global art world, I examine how and why the urban and global intersect in Dakar. My central assertion is that the city’s art scene emerges from and is shaped by the opportunities of urban life. This means that Dakar’s urban status also makes its global intersections possible, creating the context that brings artists and their propositions into conversation with other art scenes and urban centers.

Several sites associated with artistic production, exhibition, and sale are critical to mediating local urban and global art worlds. They include the exhibitions that populate the art world calendar throughout the year; the Dak’Art Biennale, which takes place every two years; the narratives and networks that form within artists’ studios; the art market that takes shape when artists and buyers transact; and the many artistic propositions that engage the city’s visual, material, and spatial fields. These are the sites through which Dakar’s art world city articulates. These sites also structure this book’s chapters. All of these sites substantiate the assertion that Dakar’s art scene and its city construct, inscribe, and call on each other in the making of an art world city.

CONCEPTUALIZING A PARADIGM: THE ART WORLD CITY

To bring together my analysis, I have conceptualized a theoretical paradigm: Dakar is an art world city, a multiscalar, urban site for artistic production, mediation, and transaction. I propose this paradigm to account for the imbrication of the creative economy and the urban environment as well as the interplay of local and global dynamics shaping Dakar’s art world. With this theorization, I submit that individuals and institutions in Dakar create and participate in an art scene with its own particular artistic trends, practices, and internal dynamics. At the same time, these individuals and institutions intersect with other urban sites and global art platforms in a variety of ways, especially through exhibitions and dialogues with art world information brokers. By examining the practices and transactions of the creative economy, which are produced and embedded in distinctive local realities as much as they intersect with global practices and dynamics, I elaborate on local narrative frames while attending to Dakar’s relationships to other urban centers and art worlds.

My conceptualization of Dakar as an art world city builds on and merges paradigms such as Pierre Bourdieu’s field of cultural production and Howard Becker’s art worlds with scholarship about urban networks, especially Peter Taylor’s world city networks.¹ I owe much to Becker’s now-classic sociological study Art Worlds, which contends that the production of art is a totalizing project involving a cooperative network of makers, suppliers, mediators, and consumers. However, I complicate Becker’s contention by engaging with the analytical units making up art worlds, from urban to global scales. While artistic practice and livelihood in Dakar are made in the context of the distinctive urban realities in which they are embedded, they also intersect intricately with global processes and dynamics. Resonant with Anna Tsing’s contention about the connections between people and places, I see these interplays of local, urban, and global as filled with both great frictions and great possibilities.² In recognition of the fraught nature of these themes in both practical usage and scholarship, I consider their intersections as inflections and negotiations much like Arjun Appadurai’s conceptualization of scapes and Ulf Hannerz’s discussion of flows.³ The productive interplay of sited and unbounded dynamics in shaping artistic practices and the livelihoods of artists gives form and momentum to Dakar as an art world city.

My analysis considers how such flows and interconnections are rendered visible in Dakar’s creative economy and, in turn, how they contribute to making its art world city. Local and global function as relational notions that stream into and out of each other, engage and contest each other, and push and pull toward productive ends. Attempts to parse where one begins and the other ends only challenge definitions, underscoring their entanglement within Dakar’s art world city. Notions of local and global are both sited and unbounded in Dakar’s urban space, and like the city’s neighborhoods, they stretch, spill, and imagine.

The conceptualization of Dakar’s art world city expounded in this book relies on the creative economy’s engagement with urbanization and with art world globalization. In light of the applicability of these themes to cities across Africa, not to mention Asia and South America, readers might wonder about other variables particular to Dakar that have allowed for the art world city’s emergence. What other features texture Dakar as a setting for this study, and how do they contribute to its art world city? The art world city paradigm articulates as it does because of historical, political, economic, and geographic factors particular to Dakar and to Senegal.

Perhaps most famously, the history of cultural production in Dakar is marked by the politics of the nation’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor (who served 1960–1980), in making a place for arts and culture in the city, the post-independence nation, and the popular consciousness.⁴ Positioning art and culture as fundamental to the new nation’s identity, his administration routinely devoted a healthy portion of the state’s annual budget to cultural projects and established a number of institutions, including the Théâtre National, Manufacture Nationale de Tapisserie, Musée Dynamique, and the École des Arts du Sénégal.⁵ In addition to building institutional infrastructure, Senghor’s statecraft formalized the context of possibility and set up the expectation for arts and culture writ large to flourish in the city. Present-day Dakar is a vibrant cultural milieu with artistic forms and cultural expressions aplenty—visual arts, theater, music, dance, literature, cinema, and fashion. In part, this current milieu can be considered the descendant of Senghorian cultural politics.

Dakar’s histories of global entanglement also underpin its contemporary position in multiscalar networks. Located on the Atlantic coast of Africa, Dakar has long been a crossroads and hub for the movement of individuals and goods. It was, by the seventeenth century, an important node in inter-African and European trade routes, and by 1902 it had replaced Saint-Louis as the capital of French West Africa. Exchanges among Portuguese, French, Wolof, and Arab traders inscribed Dakar with a history of cosmopolitan engagements. While European trade flows and French colonialism are typically posited as the foundation for Dakar’s contemporary cosmopolitanism, historian Mamadou Diouf attributes it to a more complex synthesis of these factors with Wolof values, Senegalese Sufism, and immigration.⁶

Streams of individuals from seemingly far-flung parts of the world intensify the city’s celebrated cosmopolitanism. Many come to Dakar to work in the commercial and nonprofit sectors enlivening its economy. Transportation infrastructure has also contributed to the mobility of people and commerce: the city’s port is the second busiest in West Africa, after Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, and for several decades, Dakar was the terminus for the Dakar-Niger Railway connecting Senegal and Mali. Dakar has several sizable expatriate communities, including French, Lebanese, Mauritanian, Moroccan, Cape Verdean, Guinean, and, most recently, Chinese. The area known as Chinatown, concentrated around Boulevard du Centenaire, attests to the ongoing commercial globalization in Dakar. Along with the many businesses and nongovernmental organizations based in Dakar, its stable democracy, its relatively moderate climate and beaches, and Senegalese teranga (hospitality) make it a popular tourist destination, sometimes called the Paris of West Africa. This position at the confluence of many interests, influences, and investments—North and West African, European, North American, Asian, and Islamic—shapes the city’s cosmopolitan culture and contributes to the circumstances for the art world city’s articulation.

ARTISTS IN THE CITY AND THE CITY IN THE GLOBAL ART WORLD

This book is based on research conducted in Dakar between 1998 and 2015, a period of unprecedented urbanization and art world globalization.⁷ My focus on these themes in relation to Dakar’s creative economy emerged from my observations and engagements with the art scene and the city. When I first set foot in Dakar in 1998 its population was estimated at 1.6 million; in 2014 its population was estimated conservatively at 3.5 million.⁸ By 2009 it was impossible not to notice the transformative effects of urbanization, especially the city’s construction boom, widespread sprawl, and strained infrastructure—all brought on by the demands of a growing population. While I was living in Dakar during a sabbatical in 2009, it became clear that I was in a city under constant construction. I was unable to walk from my apartment to the local boutique or the main road without navigating piles of sand, gravel, metal, and wood destined for building projects. The same was true for visiting studios and exhibitions in various neighborhoods—detours around torn-up roads were expected when traveling by car.

The largest part of my research coincided with the presidency of Abdoulaye Wade (2000–2012), whose urbancentric politics significantly reordered the city’s topography with a profusion of building projects. Entirely new road systems with tunnels and overpasses were built to connect one sector of the city to another and the city to its outskirts. Residential and commercial construction at various stages of completion was visible at nearly every turn. Made possible by Wade’s strategic alignment with foreign investments and remittance money from Senegalese living abroad, building became a metaphor and a hallmark of Wade’s presidency.⁹ His campaign for reelection in 2007 leveraged these projects, encouraging the population to continue building Senegal together with him (ensemble continuons à bâtir le Sénégal). All these building projects had profound consequences for the urban landscape, described by anthropologist Caroline Melly as a composite of half-built, not-yet dwellings whose gradual construction was contingent on the availability of funds.¹⁰

As much as the city can be seen as a compelling topographical proposition, it is also a site from which visual propositions take shape. Artistic works in the urban landscape became increasingly visible from the late 1980s and early 1990s onward. Examples include the Set-Setal murals and sculptures, iconic portrayals of religious figure Cheikh Amadou Bamba, politically and socially motivated graffiti, and public monuments, especially the most prominent and problematic of all, the African Renaissance Monument (see chapter 5). In addition to these propositions sited in the city, artists living in Dakar were increasingly engaged with the city’s visual, material, and spatial registers. Even those practitioners who had not worked previously on urban themes turned their attention to the city changing around them.

Artists explored the city’s topography, its visual traffic, and its materials just as they probed issues relating to urban processes and predicaments. Not only did the city become a resource for artistic production, it also became more integrally part of the city’s exhibition culture. The widespread engagement between the art scene and the city that is now evident during an event like the Dak’Art Biennale, whose off-site exhibitions constellate the urban landscape, was something of a nascent inclination in the 1990s. The expansion of the off-site exhibitions and their relationship to the larger Biennale project and to the city are addressed in chapter 2.

Ousmane Sow’s sculptural installation Battle of the Little Bighorn (1999) illustrates powerfully this book’s dual concern with the art scene in the city and the city in the global art world. This installation makes explicit the changing spatial and conceptual boundaries between the art scene and the city. The artwork consisted of thirty-five larger-than-life-size sculptures portraying the renowned American battle in which Lakota leaders Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull defeated US troops led by Lieutenant Colonel George Custer in 1876. The arrangement of the sculptures resembled a battlefield re-creation with scenes of a scalping, a warrior and cavalry officer dueling with pistols, and Custer’s death.

The sculptures were staged in the open air on a parcel of dusty land along the coast near downtown Dakar. With this central location, the art installation was highly visible from Dakar’s heavily trafficked corniche (coastal road). It compelled the regard of the Dakarois public—art scene participants as well as passersby. Pedestrians made their way across the busy street to experience the installation more closely and to read the large didactic panel explaining the American battle’s history and characters. Some meters away taxi drivers and passengers craned their necks to get a better look as their vehicles inched along in Dakar’s inescapable embouteillages (traffic jams).

Further consideration of Sow’s artwork illuminates that it was a site interlacing the city, its art scene, and the global art world. The exhibition’s vernissage (opening reception) resembled most of the city’s other art openings with one exception. Not only was the event attended by the who’s who of Dakar’s art scene, it also drew a sizable group of global art world players. Critics, curators, art historians, journalists, and photographers traveled from cities in Europe and North America to attend the event. The crowd’s composition emblematized art world globalization in the 1990s when art world information brokers from western metropoles discovered artists working in marginal metropolitan centers, or so the discourse went. Along with the many international platforms and initiatives based in Dakar, these individuals and the institutions they represented were key players in forging the networks lacing through Dakar’s art world city.

FIGURE 0.2. Ousmane Sow, Battle of the Little Bighorn, 1999. Mixed-media installation displayed near the corniche, Dakar, January 1999. Photograph by author.

As this book explicates, the visibility of the international art world citizenry augments Dakar’s visibility as a site in the growing roster of cities comprising the global art scene. This interface of urban and global scales has been integral to the processes of Dakar’s art worlding—of becoming an art world city. In their research on Asian cities, Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong conceptualize worlding as linked to ideas of emergence, to the claim that global situations are always in formation.… Worlding practices are constitutive, spatializing, and signifying gestures that variously conjure up worlds beyond current conditions of urban living. They articulate disparate elements from near and far; and symbolically resituate the city in the world.¹¹ What Roy and Ong propose has ramifications for Dakar because it characterizes the means by which an urban site assumes its place as a global site.

An analysis of Sow’s exhibition history further exemplifies how the circuitry of Dakar’s art world city contributes to making artists’ careers while highlighting the productive interplay between local urban and global art world platforms. As I posit in this book, Dakar’s art world city is a multiscalar engagement, a platform where artists and art connect across the range of urban, international, and global. Sow’s first solo exhibition was at Dakar’s French Cultural Center in 1988. It featured his Nuba sculpture series, consisting of men in a variety of wrestling positions, a bride and groom, a dancer, and a scarification ceremony.

The exhibition enjoyed such success that it traveled to Paris, and Sow continued to dedicate himself to sculptural works dealing with indigenous African peoples. He completed a series focusing on the Maasai in 1988, a series on the Zulu in 1991, and a series on the Peul in 1993. His works were featured in Kassel’s Documenta 9 (1992) and the Venice Biennale of 1995. Following its exhibition on Dakar’s corniche, Battle of the Little Bighorn was displayed in another open-air urban site, the Pont des Arts in Paris, in 1999. Sow’s work has also figured prominently in art world publications, especially those authored by Francophone art writers. Described as one of the world’s greatest contemporary artists and the African Michelangelo, Sow became the only African member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2013.¹²

Scholarly interest in contemporary art in Africa has grown by leaps and bounds since the 1990s. In the early to mid-1990s, a handful of artists from Dakar were identified as relevant to the burgeoning discourse on contemporary African art. Along with Ousmane Sow, the work of sculptor Moustapha Dimé was increasingly recognized in global art world platforms. Dimé was selected for the Venice Biennale in 1993, and his work has been exhibited and collected by western art world institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.¹³ What I suggest in chapter 4 about the legibility of Dimé’s work within the canons of African art and modernist sculpture also applies in part to Sow’s work with its emphasis on primitivizing subject matter and expressionist form.

Painter Mor Faye, called a poor Black African Picasso, gained posthumous recognition by way of exhibitions in Dakar and the United States.¹⁴ A smattering of articles and book chapters focused on artists Joe Ouakam (Issa Samb) and El Hadji Sy, largely in relation to their performance work in the Laboratoire Agit-Art. By the first years of the twenty-first century, several more artists were the subject of scholarly attention in publications as well as exhibitions.¹⁵ These knowledge-producing sites have significantly enriched our understanding of artists living and practicing in Dakar. Critical questions about identity, relevance, and Africanité emerged in some of the earliest scholarly sources: how were artists’ works Senegalese or African? How were they received by the art world beyond Dakar? And, as I examine here, what does artists’ global art world exposure have to do with the city where they live and work?

SITUATING THE ART WORLD CITY

Of the artists with whom I have worked in Dakar, some would be said to have global careers and others would be said to live, work, and exhibit in Dakar. Of course, many of them do both. To understand this overlap, I propose that artists in Dakar’s art scene participate in the notional space of globalism in a variety of complex, subtle, and intricate ways. My contention is that the global art world is not limited to blockbuster museum exhibitions, biennales, or art fairs in Europe or North America. In Dakar, far more artists earn their livelihoods from making and selling art than are known to the curators, critics, or decision makers associated with global art world institutions.

Not only do these artists live in Dakar and make art about the city they call home; they also participate in sites that move their careers far beyond their home city. They participate in international workshops, residencies, and exhibitions. They sell their work to all sorts of globally connected individuals—employees of nongovernmental organizations, embassies, and corporations; art amateurs and professionals; and tourists and travelers from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The borderless world market expounded by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri is alive and well in Dakar.¹⁶ Artworks, like other objects through which individuals transact in Dakar, are everywhere. For us to see these objects and their makers as participants in something called global entails embracing a spatial and notional perspective wider than exhibition projects situated in or associated with institutions in American and European cities.

The perspective advanced in this book is that artists in Dakar’s art world city have a place in dialogues located in and beyond Dakar. Artists narrativize their practices as relevant to the art scene in the city where they live and work and to discourses that cut across spatial or geographical divides. In addition to appealing directly to Africanist scholars, this book is envisioned as a crossover work with tremendous potential to connect conversations about contemporary artistic practices in Africa with those focused on global contemporary art.

This book’s contribution to Africanist art historical studies and studies in global contemporary art is twofold. In addition to providing an intensive analysis of the creative economy of artists and art in Dakar, Art World City addresses the processes of art world globalization from a sited position in Dakar rather than an art world site in Europe or North America. Situating Dakar as the center of analysis not only illuminates the inner workings of its art world city. This position also contends that conversation about contemporary art in African cities does not begin or end with the global art world platforms of Europe or North America.¹⁷ My approach thus intervenes in discourse about the implied location of the global art world in the institutions of the west while challenging assumptions that Dakar, and African cities more broadly, are peripheral to conversations about the global art world. By privileging Dakar-based narrative frames, dynamics, and practices, I center analysis about the processes of art world globalization in an African metropolis.

Given my objective of situating analysis in the creative economy of the city where artists live and work, my project draws on sustained ethnography and participant observation as well as visual, spatial, and textual analysis. These methods are crucial to establishing the position embraced in this project. For instance, mapping the city’s art world sites illuminates the expanding relationship between the art scene and the urban landscape. Likewise, close examination of artistic production reveals its relationship to the dynamics of urbanization. Interviews and conversations with artists and art world mediators, including journalists, critics, curators, collectors, and animateurs d’art, are fundamental to my interpretation.

During this study’s longitudinal arc of seventeen years, I conducted studio visits with several dozen artists at various stages of their careers. This has allowed for the tracking of developments and the historicization of artists whose works have not yet been the subject of sustained scholarly reflection. Finally, this project makes use of archival materials collected from Dakar’s many newspapers and the Dak’Art Biennale’s archives as well as press clippings, livres d’or, sketchbooks, and professional correspondence collected during studio visits. These documents were critical to defining the scope of the art world city and the processes by which it joins the urban with the global.

This introduction’s opening sentence about my collecting invitation cards also says something about the particularity of Dakar’s art scene. The city’s art scene is remarkably porous and accommodating of people and their propositions. I devote chapter 1 to the examination of how the art scene is made and by whom. My analysis sheds light on the processes of scene making as well as Dakar’s particularities and commonalities with art scenes in other cities. What I propose about the permeability of Dakar’s art scene is true for artists and the many other participants in the art world city, from students to critics and from journalists to art historians. The number of art world figures who live in Dakar and the dozens more who visit the city for brief or extended periods is impressive; the many students and scholars undertaking projects in this city also substantiates my claim about the city’s ease of entry.

This observation is significant to the book’s analytical thread about networks and relational culture as integral to Dakar’s art worlding (see chapter 3). The art scene’s ease of entry had significant implications for me, though this is not to say it was without negotiations. In addition to the research methods described above, my analysis necessarily relied on participation in exhibitions, studio visits, and other art world events. Living in Dakar for extended periods of time—a year, a semester, or a few months during several summers—was critical to cultivating relationships and sustaining interactions. The relational culture of the art world city also made possible my nuanced participation and collaboration in the city’s art scene. I curated three exhibitions in Dakar, co-organized a print-making workshop with Senegalese artist El Hadji Sy and American artist Craig Subler during the Dak’Art Biennale 2010, screened my documentary film Market Imaginary during the Dak’Art Biennale 2012, and wrote several interpretive essays for artists, one of which was picked up by the city’s main newspaper, Le Soleil.

DAKAR THE CITY AND SENEGAL THE NATION: OBJECTIVES AND RELATION TO SCHOLARSHIP

This book’s focus departs from previous scholarship on artistic production in Senegal. An ample body of research has addressed Senegalese national politics and modernism in relation to visual production and art institutions.¹⁸ Works by Senegalese scholars Saliou Diouf and Abdou Sylla and by North American scholars Elizabeth Harney and Tracy Snipe have enriched our understanding of Senegalese cultural production and political developments. United in their attention to cultural politics, national identity, and Negritude as the primary variables defining artistic production from 1960 to 1995, these sources have established a well-known narrative about art in Senegal. Their analysis proceeds from an emphasis on the nation rather than the city; their framing of both artists and art is Senegal, not Dakar. The essential element of the narrative is state patronage, that is, government funding and the subsequent lack of funding.

This narrative tells us that the art world dates to the 1960s, when President Senghor established a number of cultural institutions linking artistic production to Senegal’s post-independence nationalist project. During his presidency Senghor accorded art and culture a central role in his politics, devoting significant resources to building their infrastructure. In addition to establishing several cultural institutions, Senghorian cultural politics in the 1960s and 1970s provided the primary means for the exhibition and collection of Senegalese art. The government regularly purchased artworks, mostly paintings and tapestries, for the state collection or for state gifts. For instance, works made at the Manufacture Nationale de Tapisserie were routinely offered as gifts or displayed as hallmarks of national identity in Senegal’s embassies abroad.

Senghor’s cultural politics also established artists as a professional category in the new nation’s imagination. By creating a variety of civil servant positions for artists and providing travel scholarships and studio space, Senghor’s administration made being an artist a sustainable career. Artists working in the immediate post-independence years are usually referred to as the first generation of artists. The narrative shifted dramatically in the 1980s when Senghor left office and his successor, Abdou Diouf, proved to be markedly less committed to supporting cultural initiatives. This change in leadership marked the end of an era that elder artists refer to as the belle époque (the good old days) and signaled a reconfiguring of the relationship between Senegalese artists and the state.

Artists beginning their careers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, referred to as the second generation of artists, broke dramatically with the modes of art production and exhibition associated with their predecessors. Artists beginning their careers in the 1990s followed a similar path. While the 1990s to the present day is the temporal scope of this book, I weave aspects of art historical narrative into my discussion when they contribute to fuller analysis. Of particular relevance is the École des Arts, one of the cultural institutions founded by Senghor. In chapters 4 and 5, I address the changes in curriculum and pedagogy at the art school that shaped the relationships of art and artists to urban space.

By shifting the interpretive framework from nation to city, I foreground