A Million Pieces of Home: El Anatsui at the Brooklyn Museum

Review by Holland Cotter

Celebrated Ghanaian artist El Anatsui received his first New York solo show in the Brooklyn Museum's Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui (2013). Here, a New York Times Sunday feature previewed the exhibition themes.

Unless there’s terrible news Africa doesn’t get much notice in this part of the world. But at the Venice Biennale six years ago it was the object of thousands of beauty-bedazzled eyes, even if some of those eyes didn’t know at first what they were looking at.

Large but light and lighter is the goal. “I’m working toward buoyancy,” he said.
Will that buoyant art be African? Western?
Neither, or rather both, in ways that make such categories expansive rather than confining