Iba Ndiaye and Jean Laude, "Art, Signs, and Cultures" (1977) (original) (raw)

2023, ARTMargins 12, no. 2

This document, translated from the original French, is an edited transcript of a conversation between the Senegalese painter Iba Ndiaye and the French art historian Jean Laude. The conversation took place on the occasion of the Festival des Arts et Cultures Africaines in Royan, France, in March 1977. It was broadcast several months later, in August of the same year, on the radio channel France Culture. Iba Ndiaye (1928-2008; also written N'Diaye) was born in the cosmopolitan coastal city of Saint-Louis, one of Senegal's colonial-era Quatre Communes, and he therefore held French citizenship. He moved to Paris in 1948 to study architecture, and apart from a relatively short stint in Dakar (1960-67), he would live in France for the rest of his life. 1 During the period in Dakar, Ndiaye emerged as a major fi gure in post-independence Senegalese art, by helping establish Senegal's national art school, the École des Arts du Sénégal, and serving as the curator of Tendances et Confrontations (Trends and Confrontations), a landmark exhibition of contemporary art from Africa and the diaspora that was staged at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, in Dakar in 1966. Jean Laude (1922-83), meanwhile, began his career in 1946 as a 1 For a brief overview of the artist's life and career, see Joshua I.