| | | | Marilyn Nance: Last Day in LagosEdited by Oluremi C. Onabanjo. Foreword by Julie Mehretu. Text by Antawan I. Byrd, Uchenna Ikonne, Tsitsi Ella Jaji. Afterword by Marilyn Nance. Bibliography by Zakiya Collier, Chisom Ilogu.
 A focused study on a singular African American photographer, through an archival encounter with her documentation of the landmark FESTAC’77 festivalFrom January 15 to February 12, 1977, more than 15,000 artists, intellectuals and performers from 55 nations worldwide gathered in Lagos, Nigeria, for the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, also known as FESTAC’77. Taking place in the heyday of Nigeria’s oil wealth and following the African continent’s potent decade of decolonization, FESTAC’77 was the peak of Pan-Africanist expression. Among the musicians, writers, artists and cultural leaders in attendance were Ellsworth Ausby, Milford Graves, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Samella Lewis, Audre Lorde, Winnie Owens, Miriam Makeba, Valerie Maynard, Queen Mother Moore and Sun Ra.
While serving as the photographer for the US contingent of the North American delegation, Brooklyn-based photographer Marilyn Nance made more than 1,500 images throughout the course of the festival—one of the most comprehensive photographic accounts of FESTAC’77. Drawing from Nance’s extensive archive, most of which has never before been published, Last Day in Lagos chronicles the exuberant intensity and sociopolitical significance of this extraordinary event.
Over the course of five decades, Marilyn Nance (born 1953) has produced images of unique moments in the cultural history of the US and the African Diaspora. Nance is a two-time finalist for the W. Eugene Smith Award in Humanistic Photography. Her work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Library of Congress, and has been published in The World History of Photography, History of Women in Photography and The Black Photographers Annual. She lives in New York.
PRAISE AND REVIEWSAperture Anakwa Dwamena Last Day in Lagos, then, is a festival of its own, a feast for the creative imagination that introduces today’s generation to their artistic ancestors. New York Times: Arts Siddhartha Mitter Hers is the deepest individual image archive to have emerged from FESTAC ’77 — a major contribution on those grounds alone, but also a long-overdue focus on the early work of an important Black photographer who herself has only recently earned proper institutional notice. Wall Street Journal Offer a glimpse of the radical possibilities of Pan-African unity. Publishers Weekly Eugene Holley Jr. An incomparable photographic essay on a landmark event. It's Nice That Joey Levenson It’s a joy to see Marilyn’s work on Festac ‘77 come to life in Last Day in Lagos. It goes beyond simply being a photographic archive, and cements itself as an important cultural document for years to come. New Yorker Julian Lucas Nance’s photography scrambles the nameless and the notable, mirroring the spirit of a festival that levelled boundaries even as it celebrated difference. Vanity Fair Allison Schaller A thorough account of sociopolitical significance, beauty, and joy of the gathering. New York Review of Books Tiana Reid In part thanks to its collagelike form, it captures the range of intellectual discussions and political debates that normally get glossed over in favor of a single narrative of Pan-African grandeur…the intimate publication has a similarly polyphonous effect as Chimurenga’s, immersing the reader in Nance’s archive as though it were an unfinished sentence, an elaborate thought trailing off. The New York Times Book Review Caleb Azumah Nelson Each image is saturated in human connection; each photograph stirs a memory. And even across the distance of space and time, the world depicted in these pages thrums with closeness, or a need for it. TIME Kim Bubello Nance’s immersive archive, woven together with writing from various contributors contextualizing the work, make this culturally significant festival accessible to a wide swath of readers. |
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| | FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/1/2022 Featured spreads are from Marilyn Nance: Last Day in Lagos, the staff-favorite documentary photobook launching this weekend at The Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA). Nance, just 23 years old in 1977, when she made more than 1,500 photographs of FESTAC ’77 in Lagos, Nigeria, concludes her resounding Afterword: "If you want to see what it looked like to have 17,000 Africans gathered together from across the continent and the diaspora, living, sharing, thinking and performing together for 30 days in what was essentially a temporary Pan-African nation. Then this book is for you. I am here to tell you that it happened. I was there. This is what they didn’t teach you in Art History class—or your Black History class. These images of time and place reflect my romantic notions of Pan-African unity, my nostalgia for this incredible celebration of world culture, and hint at the terrors to come after the festival's end. For this reason, this book of FESTAC ’77 photographs is named Last Day in Lagos." continue to blog | FORTHCOMING AND RECENT PHOTOGRAPHY BOOKS |  | FRAENKEL GALLERYISBN: 9781881337232
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