Kehinde Wiley
A profile of the painter Kehinde Wiley, Barack Obama’s portraitist, who paints ordinary black people in the style of the Old Masters. I visited him in Brussels, where he was street-casting, at his studio in Williamsburg, and in Dakar, Senegal, at his luxorious Black Rock residency. (“The Painter and His Court,” The New Yorker)Kehinde Wiley
Abdulrazak Gurnah
A review-essay about the Tanzanian Nobel laureate and his novel Afterlives.” (“Children of the Coast,” The New Yorker)Abdulrazak Gurnah
Marilyn Nance and FESTAC ’77
A review of the African-American photographer’s record of a pan-African festival in Lagos. (The New Yorker)Marilyn Nance and FESTAC ’77
Sisterhood and Slavery in “The Woman King”
A critique of Viola Davis’s film about Dahomey’s all-women warriors. (The New Yorker)Sisterhood and Slavery in “The Woman King”
The Monks Who Took the Kora to Church
A feature on the Senegalese monastery where griot traditions fuse with Catholic liturgy. (The New Yorker)The Monks Who Took the Kora to Church
Africa and the Harlem Renaissance
A review of the artist Isaac Julien’s “Statues Never Die” and the scholar Kobena Mercer’s “Alain Locke and the Visual Arts.” (The New Yorker)Africa and the Harlem Renaissance
Ishmael Reed’s “Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down”
My introduction to the Dalkey Archive Press edition of Reed’s postmodern Western. (“The Yeehaw Papyrus,” The New York Review of Books)Ishmael Reed’s “Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down”