Ndoye Douts, James Mbuthia, George Lilanga, Joseph Cartoon, Ibrahima Kebe, Kivuthi Mbuno

Sponsored and planned by the GMoMA in collaboration with the Africa Art Museum, this exhibition is designed to increase people’s familiarity with contemporary African art that is still not widely known to the public. This exhibition will allow viewers to experience African art laden with fertile imagination. It will also act as an impetus to show another facet of the modern creativity of African art to those who regard it as merely a genre of primitive art. The works on show at this exhibition contain the modest happiness that the contemporary artists from the African continent wish to attain for themselves as well as that which they hope to convey to us.

Western art critics tend to dismiss works by African artists as artificial and unrealistic pieces of art that are antithetical to their lives of hardship and suffering. However, we may find ourselves mistranslating their works if we do not allow ourselves to discover the modest happiness dwelling within them. Contemporary African artworks have no titles and captions as African artists occupy themselves with the act of painting. African art is impossible to grasp in the paradigm of Westernized contemporary art and it still remains untrodden, much like the land of Africa.