SKOTO GALLERY | THE DYNAMICS OF SUCCESS

Words by Céline Seror
November 2021

THE ART MOMENTUM:

As one of the first galleries showing contemporary art from Africa in New York, can you tell us about the representation of African art in the city in 1992 and how it has evolved since?

SKOTO AGHAHOWA:

I was interested in African art prior to launching the gallery. In 1990-91, I was in Paris, which was the best time for witnessing the rise of what you might call the contemporary African art scene. Nicole Guez aka Madame Nicole had been putting together a guide, l’Art Africain Contemporain, a book that referenced artists, exhibition spaces, and art professionals from Africa. This was all before the internet. It was a very useful guide in which you could look at each artist and which country they came from.

That period in Paris was just the beginning. There was a lot going on before anything happening in the States. Revue Noire, a quarterly magazine dedicated to African contemporary art was first published during that time, there were a few galleries and alternative spaces showing works by mostly Francophone and North African artists, which further broadened my understanding of a larger contemporary African art scene.

Figures like Nicole or George Rodrigue were making things happen. Nicole with her guide and George with dinners, poetry, and conversations to which he would invite artists and writers from Angola, Mozambique, Senegal, and Cameroon, as well as people from different walks of life. They were creating very interesting dynamics, much different than in the US, although the questions asked were the same when people heard about contemporary African art; “Where do they get materials from? Where do they get canvas?” It was very hard for people to get their heads around it. Coming back to New York, when we decided to open the gallery in 1992, I was used to those kinds of questions.

I think the most frustrating thing back then was that those kinds of questions ended up taking away from people actually engaging with the art. They’d come in and ask all kinds of trivial questions that were totally unrelated to the art on display and, by the time they finished, they’d say: “I went to Ghana two years ago. My husband loved it.” That's not what I'm about.

Those were some of the issues, but it's interesting though, because even someone like El Anatsui, when we were showing him back then in the 1990s, it was like, “How do you pronounce his name?” Then, all of a sudden, years later, when El Anatsui’s work became valuable, then everybody knew how to pronounce his name. You start realising that it's actually the value of the work that matters to most of them. In other words, if you are going to spend $500,000 to buy a piece, you'd better know the name of the artist or the joke is on you.

In the end, it's just self-interest. That’s really the underlying principle in terms of how people understand what art is. We actually ended up going around those issues with various strategies. Our first show was curated by Ornette Coleman. Ornette is a highly regarded   avant-garde jazz musician with a strong following. Right away, that made it clear to people that this gallery has set a high standard for itself. This was how we wanted the public to look at the kind of art that we presented.

TAM:

We could say that you started with an empty canvas – almost to the point that you had to educate people during this very first period of showing African art in New York?

SA:

Exactly and, beyond that, we literally had to invent our audience because there was no audience to start with. For our first show, we wanted to send out invites for the reception and then realised that we did not have a mailing list. How do you get a mailing list? Most of the people we knew were artists, but that's not really what we were looking for. You are looking for support, people that will actually collect art, people that will come in and seriously engage with the work, art critics. We went to Artists' Space, a non-profit organisation in SoHo, and bought a mailing list from them before we were able to send out about 1,000 mails.

Of course, about 70 percent of those mails were returned to us within a week. It was then that we realised that you have to build your own audience. There's no easy way around it, and part of building that audience depends on the quality of the shows you put together, especially in New York. There are so many galleries here. If you are not doing something interesting and original, it just doesn't make sense. At the same time, because of the quality of what we were showing, eventually, some critics took note.

TAM:

Okay.

SA:

Critics at the New York Times for example. In order to do that, we had to  present shows that would attract a broad range of audiences. Sometimes, we did two-person shows, bringing an American artist and an African artist together. The first show we did was with Tom Otterness. He is a New York artist who has done public sculptures around the city. We proposed that he show his work with Bright Bimpong, an artist from Ghana. After that, we approached Sol LeWitt, the American minimalist conceptual artist, and showed his work with El Anatsui’s. At that time, nobody knew who El Anatsui was, but we put those two shows together, well-curated, and drew the attention of the New York Times and Art in America.

We also did several historic shows that focused on earlier generations of African artists, such as Uche Okeke and Ibrahim El Salahi. Too many times, when you ask people who the contemporary African artists are, the most they can tell you is Yinka Shonibare or Chris Ofili.  These shows make people realise that contemporary African art has historical roots.

Contemporary African art is what the gallery is known for but, at the same time, when you're in New York, you invariably have to engage with artists of the African diaspora. There is Africa in the Caribbean, Brazil, and the Americas. Over a period of time, if you follow the exhibition program of the gallery, you see that there's a clear line that runs through the aesthetics and the art that we present.