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A focused study on a singular African American photographer, through an archival encounter with her documentation of the landmark FESTAC’77 festival.
From January 15 to February 12, 1977, more than 15,000 artists, intellectuals and performers from 55 nations worldwide gathered in Lagos, Nigeria, for the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, also known as FESTAC’77. Taking place in the heyday of Nigeria’s oil wealth and following the African continent’s potent decade of decolonization, FESTAC’77 was the peak of Pan-Africanist expression. Among the musicians, writers, artists and cultural leaders in attendance were Ellsworth Ausby, Milford Graves, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Samella Lewis, Audre Lorde, Winnie Owens, Miriam Makeba, Valerie Maynard, Queen Mother Moore and Sun Ra.
While serving as the photographer for the US contingent of the North American delegation, Brooklyn-based photographer Marilyn Nance made more than 1,500 images throughout the course of the festival—one of the most comprehensive photographic accounts of FESTAC’77. Drawing from Nance’s extensive archive, most of which has never before been published, Last Day in Lagos chronicles the exuberant intensity and sociopolitical significance of this extraordinary event.
BIO
Marilyn Nance (born 1953) has produced images of unique moments in the cultural history of the US and the African Diaspora over the course of five decades. Nance is a two-time finalist for the W. Eugene Smith Award in Humanistic Photography. Her work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Library of Congress, and has been published in The World History of Photography, History of Women in Photography and The Black Photographers Annual. She lives in New York.
Oluremi C. Onabanjo is an associate curator in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The former director of exhibitions and collections for the Walther Collection, New York, Onabanjo has organized exhibitions across Africa, Europe, and North America, and managed one of the most significant private collections of photography in the world. In 2017, she cocurated Recent Histories: Contemporary African Photography and Video Art and edited its accompanying publication, which was shortlisted in 2018 for an ICP Infinity Award in Critical Writing and Research. Onabanjo lectures internationally on photography and curatorial practice, and her writing appears in Aperture, The New Yorker, The PhotoBook Review, Tate Etc., as well as publications by the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Rhode Island School of Design, Museum of Art, Providence; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; among others. A 2020 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grantee, Onabanjo is the editor of the forthcoming photobook Marilyn Nance: Last Day in Lagos (2022). She is a PhD candidate in art history at Columbia University, New York, and holds degrees in visual, material, and museum anthropology from Oxford University, England, and African studies from Columbia University, New York.
Julie Mehretu is a world renowned painter who lives and works in New York. In exploring palimpsests of history, from geological time to a modern day phenomenology of the social, Mehretu's works engage us in a dynamic visual articulation of contemporary experience, a depiction of social behavior and the psychogeography of space. She is the recipient of The MacArthur Award (2005) and the US Department of State Medal of Arts Award (2015).
[H] New York Consolidated / October 1, 2022
1.0" H x 8.0" L x 6.0" W (1.55 lbs) 280 pages