Okwui Enwezor's Award for Curatorial Excellence

On April 22 at the Gotham Hall in New York City, the Nigerian scholar and independent curator Okwui Enwezor received the Centre for Curatorial Studies at Bard College Award for Curatorial Excellence.

The august gathering of board members of both the Centre and the College, wealthy collectors, blue chip artists and gallery owners, as well as leading contemporary art critics and scholars in the ornate temple-like space of the Gotham Hall was impressive and memorable.

And the historical significance of the event cannot be missed. For, by giving this award, arguably the most important in the field of curating, to Enwezor, the Centre for Curatorial Studies acknowledged his paradigm-changing contributions to the field of contemporary art, particularly his incomparable work toward the mainstreaming of contemporary African art and artists.

The Curatorial Excellence Award, according a Centre for Curatorial Studies press release, is given to "leading curator or curators whose lasting contributions have shaped the way we conceive exhibition-making today... This award reflects the Centre's commitment to recognising individuals who have defined new thinking, bold vision, and dedicated service to the field of exhibition practice."

But crucially, Enwezor was recognised for his work as "an ardent champion of artists from Africa."

Past recipients of the curatorial award have included the legendary Harald Szeemann; Marcia Tucker, the founder of New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Kasper König of the Stadel School of Art, Frankfurt; Paul Schimmel, Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Suzanne Ghez, Director of the Renaissance Society, Chicago; Kynaston McShine, Chief Curator-at-Large, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Alanna Heiss, founding director of PS1, New York; and Catherine David, Director of Documenta X. Enwezor joins this list of the most distinguished curators of contemporary art and it is on account of this that this column celebrates his achievement.

I vividly remember receiving, sometime in 1993, a letter from someone in New York called Okwui Enwezor requesting that I join the board of an art journal that was in the making, a journal dedicated to contemporary African art.

This journal, quite unprecedented in its scope and ambition, I believed, was a much needed intervention, a concrete way of initiating debate on contemporary African art, a subject many in the West and elsewhere at the time regarded with caution or suspicion.

And if one doubted the viability of such a project, the network of art historians, critics, curators, and artists working in Europe, Africa and the United States brought to the journal's table by Enwezor was quite assuring. Yet, his letter, confident and optimistic as it sounded about the future of this proposed magazine, belied the precarious and meager financial support available for the publication-he had a few friends and family contributing some funds and that was it.

But that, years of friendship and collaboration have made me realise, is the essential Enwezor: an unnatural ability to develop and realise ideas, with prodigious intellectual rigour.

Fifteen years later, that journal, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, now co-published by Cornell University, has contributed, arguably more than any publication before and since, in establishing the field of modern and contemporary African art as a scholarly discipline.

The success of Nka-which I co-edit with Enwezor and Salah Hassan of Cornell University-speaks to Enwezor's visionary intellect, but also his commitment to exploring, as noted in his award citation, "critical issues affecting both art and culture today."

And he has done that through a series of groundbreaking, critically acclaimed, blockbuster exhibitions, starting with the 1996 In/Sight: African Photography, 1940 to the Present, at the Guggenheim Museum, the first major exhibition to explore modern photography in Africa not just by showing the work of some of its best practitioners but to historicize the art.

In 2006, at the International Center for Photography, New York, he organised a sequel, Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography, a critical survey of new uses of the photographic images by African artists.

In 2002, Enwezor organised Documenta 11, perhaps his greatest achievement thus far, because it was a most ambitious edition of the so-called Olympics of contemporary art. Judging by critical responses to its superb linking [of] rigorous aesthetics with crucial political questions confronting our world today, the exhibition that must be the most important in the history of modern and contemporary art in Africa is The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movement in Africa, 1945-1994, of 2001.

This immense show was premised on the argument that the politics of decolonisation, liberation and independence [in] Africa during the second half of the 20th century is fundamentally tied to the rise of modernist cultural and artistic production in Africa. The Short Century will remain a lasting testimony to Enwezor's incredible work as a Nigerian and African scholar, curator and intellectual working in the West.