Mor Faye at the 45th Venice Biennale. Susan Vogel
African art (but not African artists) was at the inception of modern art, and has again become part of the critical nexus of art currents of the twentieth century. Even as Africa seems to be relegated to the margins of global politics and economics, its two-pronged relevance to the wider cultural world is, ironically, more central than ever. Beginning in the early years of the twentieth century, traditional African art provided a seminal inspiration for Modern Western art; as the century closes, contemporary African art has reemerged as another possible source of inspiration and new ideas. African artists today propose new ways of incorporating the inherited lessons of twen- tieth-century Western art. Like European artists at the beginning of the century who, without subscribing to the beliefs it embodied, seized on African art for the formal ideas it contained, contemporary African artists fluently incorporate whatever they see as useful into their work, and they ...