Through works of art and unpublished documents, the Quai Branly museum pays a vibrant tribute and paints an original portrait of Léopold Sédar Senghor, the first president of Senegal after its independence in 1960 and a great promoter of the concept of blackness.
For some, Léopold Sédar Senghor is first and foremost an intellectual, a poet, a writer, a great defender of the Francophonie, a member of the French Academy. For others, he is a militant of the African presence throughout the world, one of the artisans and promoters of a concept that is both rooted in history and profoundly modern: negritude. For still others, a head of state, the first president of the Republic of Senegal, just after independence. Finally, for others, the tireless promoter of African arts in Africa and elsewhere. He was certainly all of these.
These four dimensions intersect within an exhibition which has just opened its doors in Paris. Two of the curators of the exhibition are today the guests of VMDN: Mamadou Diouf professor of African studies and history at Columbia University in New York and Sarah Liner heritage curator and head of the historical globalization heritage unit at the musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac. It is this museum located in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower that hosts the exhibition “Senghor and the arts, reinventing the universal”, to be discovered until November 19, 2023.