Kifwebe

Francois Neyt is professor emeritus at the Catholic University of Louvain and has also taught at the Official University of the Congo. As a Benedictine monk, he has been chairman of the Inter-monastery Alliance, covering over 450 communities throughout the world, and is also member emeritus of the Royal Academy for Overseas Sciences of Belgium. Francois Neyt has published several works on African art, including La Grande Statuaire hemba du Zaire, 1977; Arts traditionnels et histoire au Zaire, 1981; Luba. Aux sources du Zaire, 1993; La Redoutable Statuaire songye d'Afrique centrale, 2009; Fleuve Congo, 2010; Fetiches et objets ancestraux, 2013; and Tresors de Cote d'Ivoire, 2014. He has also organized several exhibitions: at the Musee Dapper, in Paris, 1993; at the Etnografisch Museum, in Antwerp, 1994; and at Sao Paulo, in Brazil, 2000. The Congo River exhibition he organized at the Musee du Quai-Branly Jacques Chirac, Paris, in 2010 subsequently travelled to Shanghai, Seoul, Mexico, and Moscow (Pushkin Museum). Allen F. Roberts is Distinguished Professor of World Arts and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. His studies of sub-Saharan African humanities include A Dance of Assassins: Performing Early Colonial Hegemony in the Congo (Indiana University Press, 2013) and, with his late wife Mary Nooter Roberts, Visions of Africa: Luba (5 Continents, 2007). Kevin D. Dumouchelle earned a PhD in Art History and Archaeology from Columbia University. His doctoral research in Ghana examined architectural modernity in Asante. In 2016, he joined the National Museum of African Art. He was the lead curator for Visionary: Viewpoints on Africa's Arts (2017). He has additionally served as coordinating curator for World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts Across the Indian Ocean (2018) and Good as Gold: Fashioning Senegalese Women (2018). His latest exhibition, Heroes: Principles of African Greatness, opens October 2, 2019. Previously, Dumouchelle served a decade at the Brooklyn Museum as the curator in charge of the arts of both Africa and the Pacific Islands. At Brooklyn, he conceived two award-winning re-installations of the African collection: African Innovations (2011) and Double Take: African Innovations (2014). He has written books and articles on a range of topics and curated exhibitions on both contemporary and historical African art, including Power Incarnate: Allan Stone's Collection of Sculpture from the Congo (2011) at the Bruce Museum and the Brooklyn Museum presentations of Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui (2013) and Disguise: Masks and Global African Art (2016). Woods Davy lives in Venice, California. For the past thirty years Davy has worked with stone in unaltered states, either from the sea or the earth, incorporating them into assemblages of precarious balance that appear to be in flux. He might be thought of as among the first "green" Postmodern artists. In fact, he comes from a long tradition of post-1960s artists, who either directly or just by their practical sensibility engage Eastern or Zen notions of oneness with nature, organic systems of change as engines of art composition, and non-disruptive respect for natural material in unaltered states. These works manage this, as they illuminate the poetry of nature. As Holly Meyers observed in the Los Angeles Times, there is "something thrilling about a work that appears to defy its own natural properties," while at the same time one can appreciate the work's "meditative reverence." A recent Cantamar sculpture was acquired in 2018 by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, adding to the 1986 steel and stone sculpture in their permanent collection. His work is included in many other California museums and institutions, such as the Palm Springs Desert Museum, Orange County Museum of Art, San Diego Museum of Art, Grunwald Art Center-Armand Hammer Museum, Long Beach Museum of Art, Laguna Museum of Art, as well as numerous public and private colle...