WHILE ON the topic of Christopher Wool’s contemporary abstract painting, it is interesting to look at other contemporary painters in ‘Art Now Vol: 2’ who are not white, but wholly or partly of African descent. Maybe the first black artist to begin with should be Chris Ofili, born in 1968 in Manchester, England, but whose glittery figurative paintings are glamorized influences from ancient Zimbabwean dotted cave painting, and the perfect collectors’ items for today’s black Nouveau Riche, possibly the numerous millionaire young black celebrities concerned with their collective racial self-image.
If they see painting as the perfection of technique, or in other words, the logic of colours, shapes etc, put together in an obvious fashion, they will love Ofilli’s paintings even more.
The British art establishment, its curators, certainly see his paintings as one of the best representations of their supposedly multi-cultural identity. Ofili represented Britain at the famous international Venice Biennale in 2003, with the British flag on his catalogue cover and a black room filled with cloying large paintings in mostly black, green, red and yellow, with Afro figures, mostly couples and lovers, showered with stardust, leaves, and palms.
But the overall effect, despite Marcus Garvey’s ‘Black Star-liner’ colours, was somewhat like an Afrocentric version of those old vintage glittery Christmas cards from Europe and North America, or even more contemporary, a page from those fabulous new graphic-art edition of ‘Aquaman’, or the DC comic-book series like ‘Heroes From Beyond’, etc.

Mode
What this painter mostly does is disguise figuration in a superficial abstraction; for example, the zigzag-like look of a jacket’s lapel appear as just a geometric shape, or an Afro’s hairline, the lips, cheeks of kissing black couples, appear as original designs in an overwhelming composition. But all we have to do is focus, and everything becomes quite realistically depicted, and the paintings begin to fizzle out unimaginatively.
Their strong point, however, is the regal, luxurious quality they resuscitate for an ethnic group — ever since the systematic derision of slavery and its after effects – in need to restore their normal everyday romantic pleasures.
Ofili offers a sumptuous black romanticism and ethnic worldview that repairs a damaged self-image (for those who ever fell for such ignorant derision), and this makes some of his paintings the visual equivalent of syrupy black romantic ballads, which he admits is a satisfying influence.
However, artists cannot escape comparisons, especially with older, even deceased, artists of the same medium, culture, ethnicity or race. All the artists of ‘Art Now Vol 2’ have to be looked at from such a comparative perspective, even though as artists in a changed and changing world, we expect their works will reflect these changes, these ‘new’ developments. Indeed, these changes may not offer as much pleasure, optimism, hope, strength of character, or creative risk-taking as older work in the modernist era.
Has the world, or societies, become better in all aspects, or only in some, but damaging in others?  ‘Art Now Vol 2’ is the sort of anthology that answers this by the creative style and content of most of its artists.

Female offerings
The book offers five women artists of African and mixed descent, who reflect, with individual perception and skill, both certain changes and constant aspects of ongoing life. These five female artists were all born between 1960 and 70.
Ellen Gallagher and Kara Walker are North Americans; Ghada Amer is Egyptian; Julie Mehretu is Ethiopian. And they all live and work in New York; Beatrice Milhazes is Brazilian, from ‘Rio’, and lives there, though, as Brazil’s recent rising star in contemporary painting, she travels, exhibits, and lives all over the world, including New York.
One of the virtues of ‘Art Now Vol 2’ is that it proves how far the ‘developed’ nations have advanced in terms of genuine acceptance and support of artists of ‘colour’; which is one reason they are called ‘developed’ nations, because development is not defined or confined to material or capitalist progress, technological or scientific advances, but also to true acceptance of progressions in the Arts, and freedom of expression.
The six artists of colour discussed here have had group and solo shows in the most renowned professional art museums, national galleries, and private galleries across the USA, England, Italy, Germany, France, Holland, Brazil, Japan, Scotland, Spain, and Mexico.
Because an artist’s work can bring to public attention prejudices, repressions, sufferings, denials of human or creative attributes within segments of society, to accept the expression and exposure of such work (which is open to public debate and criticism anyway) is significant evidence of truly balanced development in such nations  as those mentioned above.
Since some of the art of Gallagher and Walker in particular is by no means flattering to the largely white official art communities of these nations, the acceptance of their creative freedom is obviously recognized as an essential and beneficial part of balanced development, influenced by painful truths and self-criticism.

Contrasts
Ellen Gallagher’s paintings and prints gather numerous lessons from the early modernist iconoclasts, like Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters, who emphasized the social commentary inherent in found and ready-made objects, the throw-offs of the manufacturing and advertising world.
She applies these art-history lessons to the specific topic of how Afro-Americans, especially females, have been solicited by popular black magazines to tamper with, or adjust their appearances for acceptance in a dominant white society, or even black one for that matter. There is also the issue of blacks being solicited or targeted for special jobs, and use of special products.
However, Gallagher saves herself from the pitfall of prescribing just another deductive stereotype for her ‘people’ (who, as Ralph Ellison once reminded us, can participate and look anyway they choose, without losing their identity, since identity is a quality within, based on higher human criteria, not skin color or racial attributes) by an anthropological use of head and face accessories, also symbolic applications which echo the ‘primitive’ Africanism of masks and assemblages re-applied in an up-to-date modernist manner.
Technique, no doubt acquired at academic art school courses, is what she combines in her small paper-works, meticulously constructed by photogravure, aquatint, silk screen, laser cutting, oil, and plasticene. Her results keep us looking at the often minute, ironical, and hilarious detail.
Kara Walker is the opposite. Her work is large-scale and conceptual, pasting large silhouette paper cut-outs of blacks, who, through history, became only like shadows cast and ignored by devious racist caricatures concocted by white civilization’s historical literary texts and visual graphics.
Walker projects coloured lights on her painted, animated gallery walls, and the whole thing becomes like a fairytale film scene, in which Walker sometimes projects herself as a slave, but an exceptional one, who proclaims her own self-conscious awareness of her freedom today to freely criticize from the vantage point of her evolved ability to perform such creative tasks for an inclusive majority white audience.
The intense, fabulous, large, modernist ink-and-acrylic paintings of Julie Mehretu, a 40-year-old African artist from the city of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, now living and working in New York City, comes as a surprise, not only because the field of abstract painting has been explored by few women artists — the best and most famous, no doubt, being the beautiful Viera Da Silva of Portugal, and the unique Carla Accardi of Italy, both these artists seeming to have sparks of influence on Mehretu —  but because Mehretu has chosen the inspiration of art history over a reliance on Ethiopian cultural and ethnic themes.
This individualistic attitude is important, and even exemplary, because the nature of her painting (and this is its originality) is linked to the dynamic constructivist tradition of the Russian avant-garde, one of the greatest periods of early 20th Century art, where the structural paintings of Kandinsky, Malevich, El Lizitsky and some of the best early abstract women artists such as Popova, Exeter, and Goncharova, show the way towards topics of public development, not ideological subjective opinions and conflicts, which plague parts of Africa today.
Mehretu’s bright, hard-edged lines and shapes are not a brittle use of technique; they float and dash like exuberant musical notes across white surfaces, and between and sometimes over them, fine, meticulous, barely visible architectural drawings of public places — schools, museums, stadiums, airports, government buildings, lampposts, fences, highways, are superimposed. This miniscule public detail, integrated with a personal dynamic abstraction, keeps us alert, yet refreshingly lighthearted.

Egyptian, other influences
The 47-year-old artist, Ghada Amer, of Cairo, now based in New York, on the other hand, has brought the antique figurative art of her native Egypt to a whole new excitement in acrylic drawing combined with embroidery on canvas.
Her figurative paintings are innovative lively masterpieces, linked to a feminine eroticism that is a disarming antidote to her region’s tendency to extremism and male dictatorial intolerance. Here, the feminine psyche is sexually and romantically liberating, in the tradition of Nefertiti’s suave seductiveness, and Cleopatra’s unapologetic eroticism and charm.
Amer also makes public signs about romantic relationships, which she places in parks in view of benches; one sign in her exhibition, ‘Love Park’, at Santa Fe in the American West, reads: “Experience shows us that love does not consist in gazing at each-other, but looking at the same direction.”
The abstract paintings of the now 50-year-old Brazilian painter, Beatrice Milhazes exploded like bouquets of pleasure on the world, continuing the artistic tradition of perhaps the most positively exuberant creative continent in the world, South America.
Milhazes is frank about her indebtedness to her city, Rio’s carnival. She needs say nothing more to justify her brilliant paintings, firmly rooted in South America’s tradition of antique optical ‘primitive’ basketry and body painting, Brazilian Baroque architectural design, and Portuguese embroidery and appliqué needlework.
Her modernism is not rooted mainly in Matisse’s and Braque’s abstract paintings, but in native South American modernism, however paradoxical, which, in Brazil, was encouraged by public exhibitions since 1922.
Matisse and Braque’s exotic modernism came from looking at art from non-European sources in the South Seas, Africa, and South America. Milhazes is also the biological product of mixed Portuguese, African, and perhaps Native Indian as well, in South America’s extensive miscegenation, incomparable to anywhere else in the world.
Significantly also, developed Latin American nations like Brazil, Venezuela, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile were able to rapidly develop on several fronts because, despite their colonial exploitation, upon Independence, they did not close their doors to a surge of immigrants from Europe and Japan, but encouraged massive skilled immigration as an antidote to left-over simmering local historical and racial grievances, as well as to boost job creation. 
Milhazes’ art is evidence of the pleasure of that human mixing, its sharp technique tempered by daubed painterly application, and not only flat smooth applications.
And even though her works look so technical, everything is intuitively handmade. Her dazzling enjoyable paintings so far are a vital creative inspiration for a strong positive cosmopolitan modern South American culture.