BROADCASTS.com

Forty-six years ago, a young photographer named Marilyn Nance got the opportunity of a lifetime. A student at the Pratt Institute, an art school in Brooklyn, Nance had never left the country. But she became one of the official photographers documenting a festival in Lagos, Nigeria, called FESTAC \u201977. The monthlong festival featured artists from across Africa and the diaspora, and has been described as the most important Black cultural event of the twentieth century. But, on returning from the festival, Nance didn\u2019t find any takers to publish her photos, and fifty years later, few people know it took place. \u201cI thought I would be talking about FESTAC in 1978, not in 2022,\u201d Nance told the staff writer Julian Lucas. \u201cIf some tragic thing had happened, everybody would remember. . . . But I guess maybe there was no investment in celebrating Black joy.\u201d A collection of Nance\u2019s photographs from the event was published late in 2022, in the book \u201cLast Day in Lagos.\u201d