The African Festival of the Arts held the Washington Park Sunken Garden from September 5 to 7, gates ten to ten daily, its thirty-sixth year, produced by Africa International House. Art, music, food, fashion and culture drawn from across the African diaspora, under a stated theme: Crowning the Heritage.
A theme of that kind is a curatorial thesis whether or not it is presented as one, and it deserves to be read as seriously as any wall text. The verb is doing the work. To crown a heritage is to select it, elevate it and fix it — which requires somebody to decide, out of the enormous plurality of the diaspora, what is being crowned.
Whose Heritage, Chosen How
This is not an objection. It is the question every institution presenting diasporic work has to answer, and most avoid it by using language vague enough to commit to nothing. Africa International House at least named its position in three words and can be held to it.
The honourable version of the answer is that a festival run for thirty-six years by an organisation embedded in the community it serves has earned the right to make that selection, in a way that no museum department has. The uncomfortable version is that any act of crowning produces a periphery, and the diaspora is precisely the sort of subject that punishes tidy framing.
One cannot survey the fashion and marketplace components without seeing the thesis operating at the level of objects. Those sections are frequently dismissed as the commercial edge of a cultural event, which gets it backwards. A marketplace is where a diaspora’s material culture is actually transacted and sustained, and treating garments and goods as evidence rather than merchandise is the more rigorous position.
The Park Is Being Rebuilt Around It
The setting has changed under the festival’s feet. Washington Park is Olmsted parkland on the South Side, and the Obama Presidential Center is rising nearby. Whatever that eventually means for the surrounding blocks, it is being built next to a park that has hosted a diasporic arts festival every Labor Day weekend for thirty-six years, largely without the institutional attention now arriving.
The same park held the Bud Billiken Parade in August, which ends with a festival in Washington Park and is the largest African American parade in the country. Two events of that magnitude, one month apart, on the same ground. Both predate the Center by decades. Africa International House and the Choose Chicago listing carry the programme.
Go to the fashion section before the music, which is the reverse of what the schedule encourages. Find a single garment whose construction you cannot account for, and stay with it until you have worked out how it was made and who it was made for. The theme is answerable at that scale and nowhere else.
Cover image: Courtesy Choose Chicago