Marilyn Nance: Last Day in Lagos
Nigeria, FESTAC ’77. Marilyn Nance/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Congratulations to Counter Histories grantee Marilyn Nance whose book Marilyn Nance: Last Day in Lagos was released last week!
Edited by Oluremi C. Onabanjo, the publication revisits Nance’s photographic archive documenting the landmark FESTAC’77 festival in Nigeria. Drawing from Nance’s extensive archive, most of which has never before been published, Last Day in Lagos chronicles the exuberant intensity and sociopolitical significance of this extraordinary event.
Read more about the project, and Nance’s collaboration with Onabanjo, in The New York Times.
Marilyn Nance, at right, the photographer and author of “Last Day in Lagos,” which was edited by Oluremi C. Onabanjo, below left, seen at Nance’s home in Brooklyn. Lelanie Foster for The New York Times
“[Nance’s] is the deepest individual image archive to have emerged from FESTAC ’77 — a major contribution on those grounds alone, but also a long-overdue focus on the early work of an important Black photographer who herself has only recently earned proper institutional notice...Nance hopes her book is ‘a beginning of the research that needs to be done about this moment and this period of time.’”