"Reflections in Exile" at NCAAA

From my review of “Reflections in Exile: Five Contemporary African Artists Respond to Social Injustice” at the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists:

In recent weeks, Chaz Maviyane-Davies has been e-mailing out broadsides again. His “graphic commentaries,” as the Zimbabwe native calls them, are vivid digital posters indicting Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, as a craven thug and the international response as feckless.

Zimbabwe has been riven by violence since opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai won the first round of a presidential election in March. Tsvangirai dropped out of the June 27 runoff vote because of violent physical attacks on his supporters. On July 1, the African Union called for a government of national unity in Zimbabwe to heal the nation’s political wounds. Maviyane-Davies’s response: flies crawling over a cut in a slab of red meat shaped like Africa, with, across the top, “Another slice of African unity.”

Eight earlier posters are the highlight of “Reflections in Exile: Five Contemporary African Artists Respond to Social Injustice” at the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Roxbury. The show collects work by five immigrants, four of them now living in Greater Boston, the fifth a former MassArt student.

Maviyane-Davies left his homeland in 2001. “It was because I was doing those commentaries that I had to leave for my own safety,” he tells me.

Read the rest here.

“Reflections in Exile: Five Contemporary African Artists Respond to Social Injustice,” The Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists, Boston, June 1 to July 27, 2008.

Pictured from top to bottom: Chaz Maviyane-Davies of Boston, “Flag,” 2000; “Rights-Article 15,” 1996; “Beware of Some Masks,” 2000; “Medals of Dishonor,” 2000; “Remember,” 2000.