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African Art in Transit
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Call Number: 382.45709666 ST35AISBN: 0521434475Publication Date: 1994African Art in Transit is an absorbing account of the commodification and circulation of African art objects in the international art market. Christopher Steiner's analysis of the role of the African middleman in linking those who produce and supply works of art in Africa with those who buy and collect so-called 'primitive' art in Europe and America is based on extensive field research among the art traders in Côte d'Ivoire. Steiner provides a lucid interpretation which reveals not only a complex economic network with its own internal logic and rules, but also an elaborate process of transcultural valuation and exchange. By focusing directly on the intermediaries in the African art trade, he unveils a critical new perspective on how symbolic codes and economic values are mediated in the context of shifting geographic and cultural domains. He questions conventional definitions of authenticity in African art by demonstrating how the categories 'authentic' and 'traditional' are continually redefined. -
The Art of Conversion
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Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the west central African kingdom of Kongo practiced Christianity and actively participated in the Atlantic world as an independent, cosmopolitan realm. Drawing on an expansive and largely unpublished set of objects, images, and documents, Cecile Fromont examines the advent of Kongo Christian visual culture and traces its development across four centuries marked by war, the Atlantic slave trade, and, finally, the rise of nineteenth-century European colonialism. By offering an extensive analysis of the religious, political, and artistic innovations through which the Kongo embraced Christianity, Fromont approaches the country's conversion as a dynamic process that unfolded across centuries. The African kingdom's elite independently and gradually intertwined old and new, local and foreign religious thought, political concepts, and visual forms to mold a novel and constantly evolving Kongo Christian worldview. Fromont sheds light on the cross-cultural exchanges between Africa, Europe, and Latin America that shaped the early modern world, and she outlines the religious, artistic, and social background of the countless men and women displaced by the slave trade from central Africa to all corners of the Atlantic world.
Call Number: 704.9482 F927aISBN: 9781469618715Publication Date: 2014 -
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Reading the Contemporary
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In the past decade, contemporary African art has been featured in major exhibtions in museums, galleries, international biennials, and other forums. African cinema has established itself on the stage of world cinema, culminating in the Ouagadougou Film Festival. While African art and visual culture have become an integral part of the art history and cultural studies curricula in universities worldwide, critical readings and interpretations have remained difficult to obtain. This pioneering anthology collects twenty key essays in which major critical thinkers, scholars, and artists explore contemporary African visual culture, locating it within current cultural debates and within the context of the continent's history. The sections of the book are Theory and Cultural Transaction, History, Location and Practice, and Negotiated Identities. Copublished with the Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA), London
Call Number: 709.6 R227ISBN: 0262650517Publication Date: 2000 -
The Scramble for Art in Central Africa
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Western attitudes to Africa have been influenced to an extraordinary degree by the arts and artefacts that were brought back by the early collectors, exhibited in museums, and celebrated by scholars and artists in the metropolitan centres. The contributors to this volume trace the life history of artefacts that were brought to Europe and America from Congo towards the end of the nineteenth century, and became the subjects of museum displays. They also present fascinating case studies of the pioneering collectors, including such major figures as Frobenius and Torday. They discuss the complex and sensitive issues involved in the business of 'collecting', and show how the collections and exhibitions influenced academic debates about the categories of art and artefact, and the notion of authenticity, and challenged conventional aesthetic values, as modern Western artists began to draw on African models.
Call Number: 709.671075 Scr14ISBN: 0521583497Publication Date: 1998 -
Subject to Display
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James Luna, Fred Wilson, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Pepon Osorio and Renee Green have had a profound impact on the meaning and practice of installation art in the US. This work offers an analysis of their contributions, linking the history and legacy of race discourse to innovation in contemporary art."
Call Number: 709.7309049 G589sISBN: 9780262072861Publication Date: 2008 -
Thinking about Exhibitions
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This is an anthology of writings on exhibition practice from artists, critics, curators and art historians as well as artist-curators. It addresses the contradictions posed by museum and gallery sited exhibitions, as well as investigating the challenge of staging art presentations, displays or performances in settings outside of traditional museum or gallery locales.
Call Number: 700.74 T348ISBN: 0415115892Publication Date: 1996 -
Unpacking Culture
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Tourist art production is a global phenomenon and is increasingly recognized as an important and authentic expression of indigenous visual traditions. These thoughtful, engaging essays provide a comparative perspective on the history, character, and impact of tourist art in colonized societies in three areas of the world: Africa, Oceania, and North America. Ranging broadly historically and geographically, Unpacking Culture is the first collection to bring together substantial case studies on this topic from around the world.
Call Number: 306.47 Un6ISBN: 0520207963Publication Date: 1999 -
Vigilant Things
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Winner of the 2012 Melville J. Herskovits award (African Studies Association) Throughout southwestern Nigeria, Yoruba men and women create objects called aale to protect their properties--farms, gardens, market goods, firewood--from the ravages of thieves. Aale are objects of such unassuming appearance that a non-Yoruba viewer might not register their important presence in the Yoruba visual landscape: a dried seedpod tied with palm fronds to the trunk of a fruit tree, a burnt corncob suspended on a wire, an old shoe tied with a rag to a worn-out broom and broken comb, a ripe red pepper pierced with a single broom straw and set atop a pile of eggs. Consequently, aale have rarely been discussed in print, and then only as peripheral elements in studies devoted to other issues. Yet aale are in no way peripheral to Yoruba culture or aesthetics. In Vigilant Things, David T. Doris argues that aale are keys to understanding how images function in Yoruba social and cultural life. The humble, often degraded objects that comprise aale reveal as eloquently as any canonical artwork the channels of power that underlie the surfaces of the visible. Aale are warnings, intended to trigger the work of conscience. Aale objects symbolically threaten suffering as the consequence of transgression--the suffering of disease, loss, barrenness, paralysis, accident, madness, fruitless labor, or death--and as such are often the useless residues of things that were once positively valued: empty snail shells, shards of pottery, fragments of rusted iron, and the like. If these objects share "suffering" and "uselessness" as constitutive elements, it is because they already have been made to suffer and become useless. Aale offer would-be thieves an opportunity to recognize themselves in advance of their actions and to avoid the thievery that would make the "useless" people.
Call Number: 305.896333 D734vISBN: 9780295990736Publication Date: 2011
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A Saint in the City
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A Saint in the Cityexamines the elaborate visual culture of the Mourides, a Senegalese Sufi movement based upon the mystical teachings of Sheikh Amadou Bamba (1953-1927). In the boldly visual city of Dakar, images abound despite the fact that Senegal is largely a Muslim country. Vibrant street murals, calligraphy and calligrams, didactic posters, drawings that protect and heal, advertising images, colourful clothing, Web sites, intricate glass paintings, and innovative architecture all attest to the transformative potency that expressive culture has for Mourides. One image is ubiquitous throughout urban Senegal: the portrait of Sheikh Amadou Bamba, based upon a colonial photograph from 1913. Sacred images "work" for Mourides, and as Bamba is a saint (Wali Allah, or "Friend of God" in Arabic), his portrait actively conveys powerful blessings called baraka that help people to address everyday difficulties, challenges, and goals.The Mouride Way is observed by over four million Senegalese and thousands more around the globe including increasing numbers of African Americans and others converting to this most African of Islamic paths. Amadou Bamba's pacifism, dignity, and self-reliance, as well as his emphasis on the sanctity of work, offer a view of Islam quite different from those currently suggested by Western media. Indeed,A Saint in the Cityreminds us that there are many faces of Islam in Africa and throughout the world. It also assists readers to reconsider misconceptions concerning the prohibition of images in Islam in light of the explosion of visual culture derived from a single photograph of Sheikh Amadou Bamba.A Saint in the Citygrows from a decade of interdisciplinary research and focuses upon nine contemporary artists who base their works upon the spiritual teachings of Amadou Bamba, regardless of their particular backgrounds, training, or styles. The book boldly transgresses the boundaries normally enforced between local and global, fine and popular arts, gallery and streets, historical and contemporary circumstances. An emphasis upon Mouride artists' own voices further decenters the narrative.Allen F. Roberts is professor of world arts and cultures and director of the James S. Coleman African Studies Center at UCLA. Mary Nooter Roberts is deputy director and chief curator of the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History.
Call Number: Q. 704.948974 R542sISBN: 0930741935Publication Date: 2003 -
Inscribing Meaning
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Exploring the multiple messages and aesthetic intent of works that creatively incorporate script, both
Call Number: Q. 709.607473 In717ISBN: 9788874393770Publication Date: 2008 -
Postcolonial Modernism
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Written by one of the foremost scholars of African art and featuring 129 color images, Postcolonial Modernism chronicles the emergence of artistic modernism in Nigeria in the heady years surrounding political independence in 1960, before the outbreak of civil war in 1967. Chika Okeke-Agulu traces the artistic, intellectual, and critical networks in several Nigerian cities. Zaria is particularly important, because it was there, at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, that a group of students formed the Art Society and inaugurated postcolonial modernism in Nigeria. As Okeke-Agulu explains, their works show both a deep connection with local artistic traditions and the stylistic sophistication that we have come to associate with twentieth-century modernist practices. He explores how these young Nigerian artists were inspired by the rhetoric and ideologies of decolonization and nationalism in the early- and mid-twentieth century and, later, by advocates of negritude and pan-Africanism. They translated the experiences of decolonization into a distinctive "postcolonial modernism" that has continued to inform the work of major Nigerian artists.
Call Number: 709.66909041 Ok26pISBN: 9780822357322Publication Date: 2015
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Art and Death in a Senufo Village
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Call Number: 745.096668 G468aISBN: 0253171075Publication Date: 1981 -
I Am Not Myself: The Art of African Masquerade
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Call Number: Q. 731.75096 I1Publication Date: 1985 -
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Reinventing Africa
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Between 1890 and 1918, British colonial expansion in Africa led to the removal of many valuable African artifacts that were subsequently brought to Britain and displayed. This fascinating book analyses the ways in which African peoples and their material culture were represented in Britain at this time, the justifications for imperial expansion implicit in the displays, and the effects that this had on racial stereotyping and prejudice. Annie Coombes argues that this activity had profound repercussions for the construction of a national identity within Britain itself - the effects of which are still with us today.
Call Number: 960.07441 C781rISBN: 0300059728Publication Date: 1994 -
The Gelede Spectacle
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This remarkable study explores the use of the visual and performing arts to promote nonviolence and social harmony in sub-Saharan Africa. It focuses on Gelede, a popular community festival of masquerade, dance, and song, held several times a year by the Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria and the Republic of Benin. Babatunde Lawal, an art historian and African scholar who has taught in Nigeria, Brazil, and the United States, is himself a Yoruba and has taken an active part in Gelede. He writes from the perspective of an informed participant/observer of his own culture. Lawal bases his book on extensive field research--observations and interviews--conducted over more than two decades as well as on numerous published and unpublished scholarly sources. He casts significant new light on many previously obscure aspects of Gelede, and he demonstrates a useful methodological approach to the study of non-Western art. The book systematically covers the major aspects of the Gelede spectacle, presenting its cultural background and historical origins as preface to a vivid and detailed description of an actual performance. This is followed by a discussion of the iconography and aesthetics of costume, and an examination of the sculpted images on the masks. The book concludes with a discussion of the moral and aesthetic philosophy of Gelede and its responsiveness to technological and social change. The Gelede Spectacle is illustrated in color and black-and-white with over 100 field and museum photographs, including a rare sequence on the dressing of a masquerader. It offers, in addition, more than 60 Gelede song texts, proverbs, and divination verses, each in the original Yoruba as well as in translation. Lawal's interpretations of these pieces indicate the rich complexities of metaphor and analogy inherent in the Yoruba language and art.
Call Number: 966.00496333 L41GISBN: 9780295975993Publication Date: 1996 -
Memory
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An analysis of the Luba practice of using intricate works of art to record history. The beautiful illustrations are accompanied by testimonies by Luba people.
Call Number: Q. 709.6751 M519ISBN: 379131677XPublication Date: 1996 -
Inventing Masks
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Who invents masks, and why? Such questions have rarely been asked, due to stereotypes of anonymous African artists locked into the reproduction of "traditional" models of representation. Rather than accept this view of African art as timeless and unchanging, Z. S. Strother spent nearly three years in Zaire studying Pende sculpture. Her research reveals the rich history and lively contemporary practice of Central Pende masquerade. She describes the intensive collaboration among sculptors and dancers that is crucial to inventing masks. Sculptors revealed that a central theme in their work is the representation of perceived differences between men and women. Far from being unchanging, Pende masquerades promote unceasing innovation within genres and invention of new genres. Inventing Masks demonstrates, through first hand accounts and lavish illustrations, how Central Pende masquerading is a contemporary art form fully responsive to twentieth-century experience. "Its presentation, its exceptionally lively style, the perfection of its illustrations make this a stunning book, perfectly fitting for the study of a performing art and its content is indeed seminal. . . . A breakthrough."—Jan Vansina, African Studies Review
Call Number: Q. 391.43408996 ST89IISBN: 0226777324Publication Date: 1998 -
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See the Music, Hear the Dance
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This innovative look at African Art presents the wonders of one of America's best known African collections within the ritual context for which the artworks were first created. Drawing on the Baltimore Museum's renowned African Collection, this vibrantly illustrated exploration of African rituals uniquely encourages readers to look beyond the solitary artifact and toward an understanding of African music and dance as fully sensory experiences. The one hundred objects presented here are parts of ceremonies that rely on sounds, sights, smells, and tastes to deliver their ultimate effects. Color reproductions of the objects, including masks, sculpture, and ceramics, are accompanied by brief essays explaining the contexts within which each was created. The essays focus on costumes; dance, movement and gesture; music and other sounds; storytelling; audiences; staging, and lighting. Field photographs and archival images help bring to life the African ceremonial experience, which we can better understand with the aid of this groundbreaking work.
Call Number: Q. 709.60747526 Se32ISBN: 3791330365Publication Date: 2004 -
Mossi ( Visions of Africa Series)
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The Mossi people of Burkina Faso have a rich and complex history that is mirrored by the several types and styles of figures and masks they create. The chiefs use political art in the form of royal figures to validate their rule, while those in the spiritual class make masks that represent the spirits of nature. Unlike several other West African peoples, the Mossi have not converted to Islam in large numbers, so they continue to create spiritual art much as their ancestors did hundreds of years ago. As this book attests, the Mossi have continued to create brilliant works that they use to this day to express ideas about politics and religion.
Call Number: NB1255.B92 R67 2015ISBN: 9788874397006Publication Date: 2015 -
African arts “Protecting Mali’s Cultural Heritage”, 1995, vol.28(4)Call Number: Q. 709.5 Af83ISBN: 0001-9933
