Confluences – Diako/Danny Simmons

Press Release

Confluences

Diako
Danny Simmons

September 6th – October 13th, 2001

At a conference organized in 1956 by Alioune Diop, founder of the literary journal ?Presence Africaine? in Paris, he called on “Negro” writers and artists to embrace the concept of incorporating aspects of their rich cultural heritage in all spheres of artistic productions. He also proposed a new line of creative program, one nurtured within the compass of history and inscribed with both individual and collective identity. Strategies for achieving these objectives were left open to individual artists and writers.

The artistic cobwebs which the artists – Diako (Cameroon/France) and Danny Simmons (USA) ? in this exhibition have spun are as much a response to the African/African-American experience and history as it is to changing realities in a world of ceaseless change, new situations, production technologies and diverse experiences. Each of the artists is widely traveled and well exposed to Western art modernism both by training and contact. Each represent a resonant voice, one that achieves its own distinction and clarity amidst fluxional experiences. Their creative voices are simultaneously reclamatory, instrumental, reconstructive if not interrogative, and in some cases seek to retrieve both individual and collective memory.

Cofluences is a fit metaphor that embodies individual creative distinctions as well as group configuration. Diako was born in Douala, Cameroon and studied Design at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Brussels, Belgium before moving to Paris, where he presently lives and works. His mixed media works are heavily textured and deep in perspective. They are personal statements which investigate the tension between memory and place, the local and the global, as well as cultural dislocations and relocation. Danny Simmons was born and raised in New York. His works embrace a keen sense of social and political consciousness shaped by his experiences growing up as a black man in America. An avid collector of classical African art, he integrates signs of hieroglyphics, graffiti and fine lines to invoke cultures that are distant yet familiar.