CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/20/2015

Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design

What a book! Vitra Design Museum's glorious new survey, Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design surveys the best of the new generation of African architects and artists, entrepreneurs and doers. Advising curator Okwui Enwezor writes, "When we come to the question of design and attach the word Africa to it, we have to overcome the legacy of how this relationship has been mostly confined to the artisanal, to types of production that one might not conceive a within the vocabulary of contemporary design. We have to rethink concepts like recycling, remodeling, impoverished or informal in order to find productivity in relation to the present and not only in relation to ideas of deficit that may have been attached to Africa in general…" Featured image is Vincent Michéa's 2014 collage, "Untitled (black with spot)."