Art World City: The Creative Economy of Artists and Urban Life in Dakar

“Insightful . . . should be on the bookshelf of anyone interested in contemporary art on the continent of Africa, its politics, its display, its economics.” —African Arts

Art World City focuses on contemporary art and artists in the city of Dakar, a famously thriving art metropolis in the West African nation of Senegal. Joanna Grabski illuminates how artists earn their livelihoods from the city’s resources, possibilities, and connections. She examines how and why they produce and exhibit their work and how they make an art scene and transact with art world mediators such as curators, journalists, critics, art lovers, and collectors from near and far. Grabski shows that Dakar-based artists participate in a platform that has a global reach. They extend Dakar’s creative economy and the city’s urban vibe into an “art world city.”

“In her fine-grained analysis, Joanna Grabski demonstrates the ways that the urban environment and the sites of art production, exhibition, and sale imbricate one another to constitute Dakar as an Art World City.” —Mary Jo Arnoldi, Curator, Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian

“A valuable addition to the anthropology of cities and of art worlds. It stretches and revises the notion of art world to include multiple scales, and illustrates how the city enables simultaneous engagement for artists with local, national, Pan-African, and global discourses and platforms.” —City & Society

“A beautiful book. The photographs, most of which are by the author, are stunning.” —College Art Association Reviews

© 2017 Indiana University Press (Ebook): 9780253026224

Release date

Ebook: 10 July 2017