The Rallying Call to Decolonize: Okwui Enwezor's Legacy

While Okwui Enwezor gained world renown as art director of Documenta in 2002, his scholarly activities as curator of contemporary African art were already well-established. His In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940-Present exhibition (1996) had the temerity to describe the intentional ways in which Africans shaped their own photographic representation in a medium whose history was as long and distinguished in Africa as in Europe. 2001’s The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994 was a revelatory journey through the long process of colonial resistance and independence, and was no less revolutionary for its astonishing range of content far beyond that of “material culture,” including film, music, theater, literature, and political treatises. Eventually helming Documenta 11, Enwezor not only included an historic number of non-white, non-European artists, but actually redefined the exhibition itself by conceiving it as a final installment of several “platforms” staged worldwide before its opening in Kassel. His were strategic, paradigmatic interventions that succeeded in globalizing the art world at its most visible: the international biennial. Enwezor’s legacy is instructive. Achieving an inclusive and equitable art history that is sustainable requires decentralizing white, Eurocentric, male, cisgender, and heterosexual hegemony. These exhibitions decidedly moved Global South artists from the margins to the mainstream. In the final analysis, perhaps his most poignant and enduring legacy is the prominence of underrepresented artists and community members who are given their own voices. These exhibitions serve as inspirational templates to decolonizing art history in contemporary academe.