Scholars and collectors interested in African art have long focused their attention on traditional works -- particularly the wooden sculptures and ethnographic artifacts that may be seen in today's Western museums and are described in mainstream art history textbooks. But contemporary art work coming out of Africa and the African Diaspora communities in the West has been all but ignored and is only recently and gradually being given the attention it deserves, according to Salah Hassan, an assistant professor of African and African American art history at Cornell University.

"I am one of several art historians and art critics who have become dismayed with the state of the discipline, because it has focused mostly on the traditional and the so-called 'classical' African art, to the neglect of the contemporary -- and, more specifically, the modernist and postmodernist -- experience within African art," Hassan said. To adjust that focus, Hassan and two of his colleagues, Okwui Enwezor, a New York City-based art critic and writer, and Olu Oguibe, an artist, art historian and critic based in the History of Architecture and Art Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago, have established a scholarly journal, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, which takes its name from an Ibo (Nigerian) word meaning "creativity." The journal is published in conjunction with Cornell's Africana Studies and Research Center and edited collaboratively in New York City. Since establishing it in 1994, the editors have produced four issues of the journal.

To date, the journal has been funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Cornell Council for the Arts and the Africana Studies and Research Center; the editors are seeking additional funding for the journal, which they hope to publish every four months.

"There is a growing interest in the area of contemporary African and African Diaspora art and the modernist experience within this field," Hassan said. "Our journal serves as an urgently needed platform, filling a serious gap in the field. The only other magazine of African art in the United States, African Arts, has focused mostly on the 'traditional' forms; the only other related journals are the Hampton University--based International Review of African American Art, which focuses on African American art and occasionally publishes essays on African Diaspora art, and the Paris-based Revue Noire, which serves more as a showcase and gallery of glossy color reproductions of contemporary African art works, with few critical or analytical writings. Other mainstream art periodicals have marginalized African and Diaspora arts in general, let alone the contemporary forms."

Currently Nka has a circulation of 3,000 copies per issue with more than 300 subscribers; it appears on specialty newsstands in the United States and some other countries, Hassan said. A brief look inside reveals the journal's broad scope, both artistic and geographical.

For example, the featured artists work in many media: from photography to painting, sculpture to printmaking, collage to mixed media. Though this has been true of African artists for many years, Hassan said, historical factors have limited such works' acceptability in the West -- in large part, he said, because many art critics have an inherent bias against modern art from Third World countries.

"Many people have a misconception about the nature of contemporary African art and culture," he said. "They have always thought of contemporary African culture as second-rate, as a distorted copy of Western culture. While it is true that African culture has assimilated elements from Western culture, these elements are themselves meaningful and have resulted in the continuous creation of new cultural products."

He continued, "Western art historians do the same thing with Native American art and Chinese or native Australian art; they don't want to see the modern, because of their own misconceptions about originality, authenticity and tradition. They have forgotten that authenticity can be invented, can still be recreated."

The 70 to 80 pages of each issue of Nka contain articles on artists working in countries like Zimbabwe, South Africa, Ethiopia and Algeria -- but also England, France, Australia and the United States.

"Many African artists who live abroad, especially in major Western cities, see themselves as part of the broader African Diaspora community," said Hassan, who is from the Sudan. "These artists include African American and Caribbean artists. Because of global movement of people, migration, intellectual and political exile, you cannot limit the discussion of modern African art to the continent. We look at Africa globally, rather than continentally."

Indeed, many of the advertisements that appear in Nka are for galleries in New York City, and many of the reviews cover exhibits and festivals from around the globe. Hassan has been a curator for several of them, including the recent major exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London titled "Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa," for which he co-authored a book with the same title. He also was curator for a show at Cornell's Herbert F. Johnson Museum in the spring of 1993, when he was a visiting scholar from the State University of New York at Buffalo. (He became an assistant professor at Cornell in 1994.)

This month Hassan is one of the curators and writers for "Images of Africa," a major festival of African arts in Copenhagen; he also is in the process of writing a book on the modernist experience in African art, funded by a grant from the Toyota Foundation. He will be curator for an exhibition of African women artists at the Johnson Museum in January of 1997.

In a 1995 issue of Nka, Hassan wrote, "Of all the categories of African art, modern art, especially that of Western-trained artists, has received the least attention from art historians and other scholars of African art. . . . Most Western museums still refuse to acquire or exhibit contemporary African work because they do not fit in or measure up to stereotyped standards of African art."

More recently, he said his hope for Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art is that it will "create a shift within the paradigm of African art history . . . and make people pay attention to this modern and postmodern experience in African art."