Selected Writings Okwui Enwezor
Selected Writings is a landmark two-volume set of writings by the transformational art curator Okwui Enwezor that demonstrates his tireless efforts to decolonize the global contemporary art world. Spanning a quarter-century, these selections reflect the depth and breadth of Enwezor’s writing and its role in his tireless efforts to decolonize the art world.
Selected Writings,
Volume 1
Toward a New African Art Discourse
Okwui Enwezor
Edited by Terry Smith
Includes fifteen essays written between 1994 and 2006.
August 2025
72 color illus. 472pp
9781478031529 £32.00 PB
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
“This selection of Okwui Enwezor’s writing offers an intimate look into the beliefs which fueled his practice: that of plurality, fluidity, and openness. It is through these writings that we are able to stay the course of Enwezor’s incomparable vision and insist as he did on an expansive understanding of the world and all those who inhabit it.”
Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator
Selected Writings,
Volume 2
Curating the Postcolonial Condition
Okwui Enwezor
Edited by Terry Smith
Includes seventeen essays written between 2006 and 2019.
August 2025
82 color illus. 544pp
9781478031567 £32.00 PB
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Drawn from exhibition catalogs, art journals, interviews with artists, art reviews, curatorial statements, historical studies, and book chapters, these texts show him striving to fulfil the first main ambition that drove his career: to found and sustain what he called a “New African Art Discourse.” Demonstrating that his writing helped fulfill this goal, this collection reaffirms Enwezor’s status as a transformational figure in the global contemporary art world.
Also of interest
Postwar Revisited
A Global Art History
Edited by Okwui Enwezor & Atreyee Gupta
Okwui Enwezor’s 2016 exhibition
Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 redefined the history of art produced in those two decades. Nearly a decade later, Postwar Revisited returns to these debates to present an image of a historical period in which Western conceptions of art, aesthetics, and philosophy are all thrown into intense flux after Auschwitz and Hiroshima, while the cultural energies of decolonization generate myriad artistic and intellectual practices across the globe, which re-engage the connections of art to life itself. Provoking new ways of thinking, engaging, and narrating art history, Postwar Revisited is essential reading for those interested in debates on global art history and global modernism, the intersections between art and decolonization, the cultural aspects of the Cold War and the Non-Aligned Movement, and modern and contemporary art more generally.
April 2025 80 color illus. 360pp 9781478031451 £27.99 PB
“Rethinking the narrow Euro-American basis of ‘postwar’ as an art historical epoch, Postwar Revisited makes a major contribution. It reflects and will further influence the broader spirit of revisionism toward more global understandings of the twentieth century that have been effectively redefining the field of art history over the past two decades.” –Saloni Mathur, author of, A Fragile Inheritance: Radical Stakes in Contemporary Indian Art
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Antinomies of Art and Culture
Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity
Edited by Okwui Enwezor, Nancy Condee & Terry Smith
In this landmark collection, world-renowned theorists, artists, critics, and curators explore new ways of conceiving the present and understanding art and culture in relation to it. Antinomies of Art and Culture is a wide-ranging yet incisive inquiry into how to understand, describe, and represent what it is to live in the contemporary moment. The volume’s centerpiece is a sequence of photographs from Zoe Leonard’s Analogue project. Depicting used clothing, both as it is bundled for shipment in Brooklyn and as it is displayed for sale on the streets of Uganda, the sequence is part of a striking visual record of new cultural forms and economies emerging as others are left behind
January 2009 77 illus. 346pp
9780822342038 £32.00 PB
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Okwui Enwezor
The Art of Curating
Edited by Chika Okeke-Agulu, Jane Chin Davidson & Alpesh Kantilal Patel
This special issue is dedicated to the memory of Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019), the first African and Black curator and director of documenta11 (2002) and the 56th Venice Biennale (2015). The articles and personal tributes collected here recognize the profound impact left by the Nigerian art historian, curator, poet, and educator.
Contributors: David Adjaye, Hoor Al Qasimi, Natasha Becker, Naomi Beckwith, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Jody B. Cutler-Bittner, Jane Chin Davidson, Shane Doyle, Tamar Garb, Kendell Geers, Salah M. Hassan, Amelia G. Jones, Abdellah Karroum, Monique Kerman, Mohammed Ibrahim Mahama, Julie Mehretu, Susette S. Min, Wangechi Mutu, Sabine Dahl Nielsen, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Alpesh Kantilal Patel, Anne Ring Petersen, Yinka Shonibare, Penny Siopis, Mary Ellen Strom, Przemyslaw Strozek, Mikhael Subotzky
April 2021 85 color illus. 152pp 9781478021162 £20.99 PB DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
