Augie N'Kele

1 Forgotten Heritage 2 Village Life 3 Music is Everywhere 4 African Kingdoms 5 Countries-Cultures 6 Slavers & Raiders 7 The Journey 8 The New World 9 The New World Africa's Children About Augie N'Kele What People Are Saying Archives Exhibitions Artist Residencies Touring Norway Two Dimensional Work Print Links Critiques & Comments Motion My Photos

Welcome, you have reached the website home of Congo- born American artist, Augie N'Kele

Field Hands, a wire sculpture by Augie N'Kele was acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art in Dallas, Texas, through contribution from The Barrett Collection.  

In January, 2008, the Dallas Museum of Art and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston announced that Nona and Richard Barrett of Dallas gave more than one hundred works from their outstanding private collection of contemporary Texas art to the permanent collections of both museums. The Barretts’ gift to Texas’s two largest museums, and to two of the nation’s most important artistic institutions, represents artwork from the 1970s to the present, with the majority of the pieces dating from the 1980s and 90s.

Field Hands, 1994, wire & aluminum, 15” x 24” x 11”

This photo was taken at the artist's first exhibition in Texas in 1992.  He was explaining to a reporter that he wanted to use his sculptures to tell stories with a theme that would span many centuries.  He begins with African life before the arrival of Europeans. 

...evidence...points to Africa as the Cradle of Humankind...George Abungu, Director-General of the National Museums of Kenya

Relatives Witness A Birth II

1994, H. 24"  W. 18"  D. 18"   Portfolio 5

TWO FISHERMEN 
©1993 24x44x13" Wire/Aluminum

Rainforest, the River Congo, about 8000 navaigable miles of waterways in the Congo basin offer both a major food source and the main avenue of travel. The Congo River has more than 1000 species of fish. The nkamba, weighs up to 300 pounds and is strong enough to tow a boat with fishermen aboard. Fishermen carve dugout boats from logs as they have done for countless centuries. They display uncommon grace and agility as they maneuver across swift moving and often treacherous rivers.

Man with Fish Trap 

24 x 44 x 13 inches
Wire, Aluminum
1991, Portfolio 

Barbed points believed to be 80,000 years old have been found in Congo, according to a report by Alison Brooks, an archaeologist at George Washington University. 

Made from bone, the tools may have come from a stone age fishing camp where early humans speared spawning giant catfish on the banks of a lake between Congo and Uganda. The implements show tool making skills that, until now, have been credited only to Europeans who lived thousands of years later, Brooks said.

In a 2001 correspondence with Forgotten Heritage, Brooks said that more recent work has confirmed these previously published dates.

"...our (tools) are in bone (we also have some very crude stone tools along with the bone ones) -- I would say "double-pointed bone implements"...We...have a kind of knife or dagger-shaped pointed bone tool without barbs, and also a cylindrical double-pointed bone tool without barbs." Brooks published a paper in the Journal of Human Evolution, arguing that the transition to modern human BEHAVIOR happened in Africa before it occurred anywhere else. (National Geographic Magazine, July, 2000)

Two Hunters With Antelope

14 x 24 x 11 inches
Wire, Aluminum, Found
1994, Portfolio # 97

Food Preparation II

17 x 33 x 12 inches
Wire, aluminum, Found
1993, Portfolio # 7

"People say it's just amazing how he uses the material he uses, how someone can take ordinary wiring and create sculptures with it," said Leon Woods, who helped install an exhibit of N'Kele's work at the Diggs Gallery at Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina. "... people are still talking about it."...Fort Worth Star-Telegram