Photo: © David Coulson

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., and the Getty Conservation Institute are co-organizing a photographic exhibition of African rock art at the Kennedy Center as part of the four-year African Odyssey festival. The exhibition, entitled The Painted Rocks of Africa—Other-World Visions of the San, will open on April 29, 1998. It is being curated by a leading authority on the rock art of southern Africa, Professor David Lewis-Williams of the Rock Art Heritage Centre, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. The focus of the exhibition will be the rock art of the San people of southern Africa; however, the final module of the exhibition will broaden the scope to include rock art elsewhere in Africa and the world. An important message of the exhibition is the geographical ubiquity of rock art, as well as its continuity from ancient times to the present. The exhibition coincides with a conference in Washington, D.C., entitled African Renaissance, which will be attended by a number of prominent African leaders.