Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club

Chosen as a Smithsonian Scholar Favorite Book of 2022 by Karen Milbourne, curator, National Museum of African Art.

The first book to feature Jacob Lawrence’s Nigeria series, this richly illustrated volume also highlights Africa’s place as a global center of modernist art and culture.

This revelatory book shines a light on the understudied but important influence of African Modernism on the work of Black American artist Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000). In 1965, a New York gallery displayed Lawrence’s Nigeria series: eight tempera paintings of Lagos and Ibadan marketplaces that were the culmination of an eight-month stay in Nigeria. Lawrence’s residency in Nigeria put him in touch with the Mbari Artists and Writers Club, an international consortium of artists and writers in post-independence Nigeria that published the arts journal Black Orpheus.

The book and accompanying exhibition place the Nigeria series alongside issues of Black Orpheus and artwork created by Mbari Club artists, including Uche Okeke, Jacob Afolabi, Susanne Wenger, and Naoko Matsubara. Diverse essays explore the influence of Africa’s post-colonial movement on American modernists and developing African artists; the women of the Mbari group; and the importance of art publications in circulating knowledge globally.