“Searching for Africa in ‘LIFE'” by Alfredo Jaar at New School, NYC

When publisher Henry Luce acquired LIFE Magazine in 1936, he issued a bold mission statement: “To see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events…”

Over the course of its colorful existence, LIFE largely fulfilled that goal, providing millions of readers unprecedented visual access to what Luce called “Strange things—machines, armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungle and on the moon.”

However, as the Chilean-born, American artist, architect and filmmaker Alfredo Jaar reveals in his new site-specific commission for The New School, there has been a glaring, continent-sized omission in the magazine’s Earth-spanning content: Africa.

“Throughout the magazine’s 60 year circulation, there were only a handful of covers depicting Africa,” the artist said during an unveiling of the piece, Searching for Africa in LIFE, at the New School’s University Center. “And those depictions are painful stereotypes which ignored a vast continent’s cultural richness and racial diversity.”

Now on permanent view in the University Center’s Arnhold Forum Seventh Floor Reading Room, Searching for Africa in LIFE is a collection of 2,128 covers of the all-photographic news magazine between 1936 and 1996 illuminated by an enormous lightbox. Looking back on 60 years of LIFE covers, it becomes clear that Africa—a continent of one billion-plus people containing myriad cultural and historic treasures—was largely left out of the magazine’s editorial picture.

Alfredo Jaar’s work for the Prospectus, Public Interventions, can be viewed here.