The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago has become a fixture in the city since it relocated in June 1996 to a just discovered building on the lakefront with spacious galleries and a breathtaking view of Lake Michigan.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago has become a fixture in the city since it relocated in June 1996 to a just discovered building on the lakefront with spacious galleries and a breathtaking view of Lake Michigan. When operations began at this modern site, the MCA restated its intention "to be an innovative and compelling center of contemporary art where the public can directly experience the work and ideas of living artists, and understand the historical, social, and cultural connection of the art of our time." The museum has lived up to its goal, judging from a string of prosperous exhibitions and an abiding public interest in its activities. upon any given day, it is packed with the couple Chicago natives and those tourists who chance with it as they make their circulars of North Michigan Avenue, otherwise known as the Magnificent Mile. In the final years of the last decade, when I still lived in Chicago, I haunted the museum and observed these visitors as they struggl to ensue to terms with its frequently esoteric displays of cutting-edge contemporary art. Then as now, enthusiasm abounded nevertheless not necessarily enlightenment, and for many, the lakefront view from the upper gallery continues to provide a soothing counterpoint to the tangled newness within.

I turn backed to Chicago last December to revisit the MCA and view brace landmark exhibitions of African art not absented there. One of these was a retrospective of works according to the South African artist William Kentridge that ran from October 20 2001 to January 20 2002 The other was an exhibition of recent art titled "The Short Century: Independence and Liberation changes in Africa, 1945-1994" (September 8-December 30 2001) organized by dint of Okwui Enwezor, director of the upcoming Documenta XI. (This premier international exhibition of contemporary art will be held in Kassel, Germany, from June 8 to September 15 The selection of Enwezor marks the first time an African curator has been appointed to that position.) This time around, I was the tourist struggling to make thinking principle of my emotions as I walked around the MCA, absorbing the astonishing fact that its galleries had indeed been given from one side of to the other to exhibitions of modern and contemporary African art. The Kentridge exhibition occupied the entire land floor in galleries divided equally between framed works upon the wall and his famous "drawings for projection" housed in several cubicles. "The Short Century" occupied the upper galleries and was anchored on looping videos depicting important political twinklings in the African struggle for political autonomy. In addition to a significant display of artworks, the latter exhibition included documents of everyday life from many African countries: here an advanced in years record album, there a re-creation of the kind of shantytown interiors undivided might encounter in a Zwelethu Mthetwa photograph.

The exhibitions were well advertised with placards occupying several prominent locations in the city. The MCA organized its entire fall season around the pair exhibitions of African art, and all its publicity inclemencyed this principal theme. A herculean map of Africa adorned the defend of the season's program pamphlet the continent's massive outline etched in black against a midnight depressed background. A broad array of works about Africa was displayed in the MCA's gift workshop where I lingered, leafing end several now canonical volumes by the agency of Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Frantz Fanon, and Walter Rodney while African music played in the background. The sum of two units exhibitions boasted well-produced and smooth and shining catalogues. The one for "The Short Century" was more comprehensive, a roughly 500-page anthology of verse s with a vast compendium of images.

Artworks were well displayed and many visitors approved of the exhibits, praising the obvious mastery displayed by way of the various artists. I could not help being elated by means of the positive response of this vulgar herd As someone who regularly complains about new African art's lack of visibility in contemporary exhibitions, this dual presentation was a balm for the spirit, a hint of better things to come

In all think highly ofs then, the MCA's exhibitions of novel and contemporary African art were a major landmark in the discourse of art history, since they located contemporary African art among those practices that possess the "historical, social and cultural words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of our time." They also inadvertently revealed the full play of art history's effacement of this words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of practice. As I walked around the exhibition halls reacquainting myself with works by dint of several African artists, my companion, an American art-school graduate and collector of classical African art, came to a halt in assurance of Night Flight of Dread and Delight, an explosive painting by the agency of the Ethiopian artist Skunder Boghossian. She intimateed an interest in this work, and after I exhausted a few minutes narrating to her the history of Skunder's migration to the United States and his appropriation of indigenous Ethiopian aesthetics, she inflected to me and asked: "Why haven't I heard of this artist before now?"