Contemporary African art has become a force in the international art world, appearing in galleries, museums and prestigious global surveys. This past summer, for the first time in its 112-year history, the Venice Biennale included an entire pavilion devoted to African art.

And so the timing of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’s new "Tapping Currents" exhibit of top African talent, six of whom showed in Venice, is spot on.

Organized by Leesa Fanning, the museum’s associate curator of modern and contemporary art, the exhibit features seven pieces by seven artists in the Bloch Building’s Project Space and two weekends of new media screenings.

The show offers an illuminating introduction to African art today.

Fanning’s selections steer clear of suffering AIDS patients, starving children, exotic animals and other longstanding clichés that figure in Western perceptions of the continent

Instead, these African artists probe the soul of their homeland, illumining its values, traditions, history and the influences that shaped it.

And don’t look here for traditional woodcarving, weaving and pottery. The "Tapping Currents" artists -- all born in Africa, although many of them now live in Europe and the U.S. -- are well-versed in the styles and strategies of modernism and postmodernism, which they use to address African concerns as well as global issues.

Unifying this exhibit is an interest in themes of community, connection, spirituality and history. Several works address the legacy of colonialism.

All of these factors come into play in "Hovor," a glittering rumpled tapestry by Ghanaian-born El Anatsui, who works in Nigeria.

The work is huge, measuring 12 feet high and more than 16 feet long, which makes it all the more amazing that the piece is made entirely from aluminum liquor-bottle tops -- thousands of them -- flattened into glinting strips and stitched together with copper wire.

The work’s design and pieced-together construction resemble traditional Ghanaian kente cloth; "Hovor" means "cloth of wealth" in the Ewe language of Ghana.

Anatsui’s use of liquor caps adds greatly to the work’s layered meanings, expressing a contemporary ethic of recycling while alluding to liquor’s role in African history as a ritual libation and a commodity exchanged for slaves.

Installed at the other end of the room from Anatsui’s piece, an elaborately costumed headless figure by London-based Yinka Shonibare also alludes to Africa’s history of exploitation by the west.

Representing a European colonizer, the 7-foot-tall figure is an imperious presence, clad in a topcoat with ruffled floor-length train, form-fitting vest and foppish high-waisted pants. Fanning explains his missing head as Shonibare’s comment on the "thoughtlessness of the colonizer."

Shonibare frequently uses this device in his work in conjunction with costumes of printed patterned fabric. Contrary to popular perception, the fabric is not native to Africa but is a type of Indonesian batik imported to the continent by Dutch colonizers in the 19th century.

Fabric is a touchstone of many of the works in this show, including Georgia Papageorge’s video of her 2001 environmental installation, "Africa Rifting," which keyed off a geological rift that developed millions of years ago, separating the formerly joined continents of Africa and South America.

First presented in Namibia and later in Brazil, the work featured billowing swaths of red fabric, unloosed beside the sea. In some shots the long windblown panels evoke a river of blood, in others, where they are partly covered by shifting sand, they read as scars in the earth. But the overall feel is celebratory, in keeping with the artist’s aim that the piece should serve as a healing agent for the rifts among people.

Kwesi Owusu-Ankomah’s large black-and-white painting, "Movement 34," takes its cues from the traditional adinkra funerary cloth of Ghana. Arrayed across the surface in a grid, adinkra motifs such as the head comb, measuring stick and ram’s horn appear with other cultural symbols and images -- including a tennis ball. The symbols camouflage, but do not hide, monumental figurative images of two athletic African men, who sprint forward with determination.

The artist thinks of these as "utopian paintings," Fanning said, with their "perfect idealized figural forms and perfect universal language."

Born in Cameroon, Samuel Fosso began taking photographs of himself when he was 13 years old, and he’s still at it, experimenting with various identities, from pirate to prom girl, in front of the camera. "Tapping Currents" features the artist in the guise of a liberated African-American woman from the 1970s.

Like many of Fosso’s photographs, the image is both busy and bizarre, with its clash of patterned fabrics and theatrical conception of his imagined subject. The work has much in common with the posed self-portraits of Cindy Sherman but, as Fanning points out, Fosso came up with the idea on his own.

On the other hand, Philadelphia-based Odili Odita deliberately engages the Western tradition of geometric abstraction. Odita draws inspiration from both Op art and minimalism in his acrylic painting "Fusion," featuring hard-edged "rays" emanating diagonally from a vertical seam that bisects the canvas. Executed in rich hues that allude to the landscape and fabrics of his native Nigeria, the composition exudes dynamism and optimism, like a sunrise announcing the dawn of a new day.

Julie Mehretu’s large abstract painting, "Dispersion," conveys a darker message. The Ethiopian-born New York artist’s paintings typically suggest aerial views of the manmade landscape, under siege from winds, tides and fires. Here, fluttering colored shapes and swooping lines cavort over a densely layered topography of human settlement. A "cleared" area in the center of the painting yields a view of urban-planner style diagrams, buried elsewhere in the composition under snarled inky masses and other calligraphic intimations of chaos.

COMING ACQUISITION

Late last month the Nelson announced the acquisition of a major work by El Anatsui, the Ghanaian-born artist known for his shimmering tapestries of metal bottle tops and copper wire.

With funds from the William T. Kemper Foundation, the Nelson purchased Anatsui’s "Dusasa I," one of the most lauded and reproduced works shown in the 2007 Venice Biennale, and it’s a gigantic one, measuring 20 by 30 feet.

The piece will be featured in the museum’s summer 2008 exhibition of William T. Kemper acquisitions.

The exhibit marks the third showing of an Anatsui work in Kansas City in a year. The October 2007 opening of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art at Johnson County Community College featured one from the Nerman collection; "Tapping Currents" displays "Hovor," on loan from the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College.

On exhibit

The show: Tapping Currents: Contemporary African Art and the Diaspora

Where: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 4525 Oak St.

When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Sunday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Closed Mondays. The exhibit continues through April 13.

How much: Free

For more information: 816-751-1278 or www.nelson-atkins.org and african art at nelson atkins

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