Art World City by Joanna Grabski

Art World City focuses on contemporary art and artists in the city of Dakar, a famously thriving art metropolis in the West African nation of Senegal. Joanna Grabski illuminates how artists earn their livelihoods from the city's resources, possibilities, and connections. She examines how and why they produce and exhibit their work and how they make an art scene and transact with art world mediators such as curators, journalists, critics, art lovers, and collectors from near and far. Grabski shows that Dakar-based artists participate in a platform that has a global reach. They extend Dakar's creative economy and the city's urban vibe into an "art world city."

Joanna Grabski is Warner Professor and Chair of Art History and Visual Culture at Denison University. She is editor (with Carol Magee) of African Art, Interviews, Narratives: Bodies of Knowledge at Work (IUP). She wrote, directed, and produced the feature-length documentary film Market Imaginary, focused on Dakar's sprawling Colobane Market.

Concise and insightful, Joanna Grabski's Art World City should be on the bookshelf of anyone interested in contemporary art on the continent of Africa, its politics, its display, its economics, and in methods of how to
understand and write about it in manner that treats the art of Dakar with the autonomy and agency it clearly expresses.

Art World City is a beautiful book. The photographs, most of which are by the author, are stunning.

Art World City is a valuable addition to the anthropology of cities and of art worlds. It stretches and revises the notion of art world to include multiple scales, and illustrates how the city enables simultaneous engagement for artists with local, national, Pan-African, and global discourses and platforms.