From the contents: Christine MATZKE: Comrades in arts and arms: stories of wars and watercolours from Eritrea. - Sabine MARSCHALL: Positioning the other': reception and interpretation of contemporary black South African artists. - Kristine ROOME: The art of liberating voices: contemporary South African art exhibited in New York. - Jonathan ZILBERG: Shona sculpture and documenta 2002: reflections on exclusions.
A CD-ROM and DVD set extracted from the 'The Art of Africa: A Resource for Educators.' The CD-ROM "contains a PDF of 'The Art of Africa: A Resource for Educators, ' which features forty traditional works of African art in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It includes a brief overview of the Metropolitan's collection of African art; a short introduction and history of Africa; an explanation of the role of visual expression in the continent; descriptions of the featured works of art and background about the materials and techniques that were used to created them ... The DVD, 'Ci Wara Invocation, ' "presents the highlights of a dozen ci wara performances in Bamana communities in present-day Mali that were recorded by five different observers between 1970-2002. Among the Bamana, oral traditions credit a mythical being named Ci Wara, a divine being half mortal and half antelope, with the introduction of agriculture to the Bamana. The ci wara performances are part of biannual celebrations that either launch or conclude the farming season."--Container
Once seen as a collection of artifacts and ritual objects, African art now commands respect from museums and collectors. Bennetta Jules-Rosette and J.R. Osborn explore the reframing of African art through case studies of museums and galleries in the United States, Europe, and Africa. The authors take a three-pronged approach. Part One ranges from curiosity cabinets to virtual websites to offer a history of ethnographic and art museums and look at their organization and methods of reaching out to the public. In the second part, the authors examine museums as ecosystems and communities within communities, and they use semiotic methods to analyze images, signs, and symbols drawn from the experiences of curators and artists. The third part introduces innovative strategies for displaying, disseminating, and reclaiming African art. The authors also propose how to reinterpret the art inside and outside the museum and show ways of remixing the results. Drawing on extensive conversations with curators, collectors, and artists, African Art Reframed is an essential guide to building new exchanges and connections in the dynamic worlds of African and global art.
KEYNOTE: This book provides a savvy survey of the latest work by designers, craftspeople, and architects of African descent around the world. Artists and designers of African ancestry-many in Africa but also others throughout Europe, the Americas, and the Far East- are working in a wide array of mediums: fashion, architecture, non-traditional crafts, design, fine art, and photography. Authors Lowery Stokes Sims and Leslie King-Hammond, together with six contributors, challenge presumptions of what constitutes an 'African' style or aesthetic, and demonstrate the power and expressive potential of materials, textures and forms. Work by well-known artists such as Yinka Shonibare, MBE and architects including David Adjaye appear alongside those of lesser-known but equally exciting designers whose garments, carpets, baskets, ceramics, furniture, body arts, wall painting, photographs and sculpture blur the distinction between art and craft. The result is an enormously diverse display of young and established talent, and a wide-ranging survey of contemporary African art and design. AUTHOR: LOWERY STOKES SIMS is Director and Organizing Curator of the Global Africa Project and the Charles Bronfman International Curator at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. She has published extensively on African, Latino, Native and Asian American Artists. She is a contributor to Fritz Scholder: Indian/ Not Indian (Prestel). LESLIE KING-HAMMOND is the founding director of the Center for Race and Culture and the Maryland Institute College of Art. A noted scholar, teacher, and curator, King-Hammond has directed numerous exhibitions on African-American art and artists. 200 colour illustrations
From the contents: Christine MATZKE: Comrades in arts and arms: stories of wars and watercolours from Eritrea. - Sabine MARSCHALL: Positioning the other': reception and interpretation of contemporary black South African artists. - Kristine ROOME: The art of liberating voices: contemporary South African art exhibited in New York. - Jonathan ZILBERG: Shona sculpture and documenta 2002: reflections on exclusions.
This study focusses on the exhibition of the Tree of Life, a sculpture made in Mozambique of decommissioned, dismantled weapons, created to celebrate peace and commissioned by the British Museum, chosen to be the symbol of the “Africa 2005” season of cultural events and exhibited in its Great Court between February and October 2005. This artwork was first exhibited in Maputo before being dispatched to Britain and it is presently on display at the Sainsbury African Galleries of the British Museum, in London. This dissertation moves along two converging routes: the articulation of the meaning(s) produced within the exhibition and the role of exhibitionary institutions in the creation of social knowledge. A central topic of discussion is the different practices and sites of exhibition of the Tree of Life sculpture in Britain and in Mozambique, in an endeavour to illustrate/establish the differences which determine and/or condition the specific approaches used in the two distinct cultural contexts within which it was exhibited. The discussion evolves towards exploring how a new discourse on the exhibition of contemporary African art questions and challenges both curatorial practices and cultural concepts of collecting, displaying and interpreting art objects and negotiating meaning.
A landmark work of art history: lavishly illustrated and extraordinary for its thoroughness, A History of African-American Artists -- conceived, researched, and written by the great American artist Romare Bearden with journalist Harry Henderson, who completed the work after Bearden's death in 1988 -- gives a conspectus of African-American art from the late eighteenth century to the present. It examines the lives and careers of more than fifty signal African-American artists, and the relation of their work to prevailing artistic, social, and political trends both in America and throughout the world. Beginning with a radical reevaluation of the enigma of Joshua Johnston, a late eighteenth-century portrait painter widely assumed by historians to be one of the earliest known African-American artists, Bearden and Henderson go on to examine the careers of Robert S. Duncanson, Edward M. Bannister, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Aaron Douglas, Edmonia Lewis, Jacob Lawrence, Hale A. Woodruff, Augusta Savage, Charles H. Alston, Ellis Wilson, Archibald J. Motley, Jr., Horace Pippin, Alma W. Thomas, and many others. Illustrated with more than 420 black-and-white illustrations and 61 color reproductions -- including rediscovered classics, works no longer extant, and art never before seen in this country -- A History of African-American Artists is a stunning achievement.
Together, the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, and the Institut des Musées Nationaux du Zaire (IMNZ) in the Congo have defined and marketed Congolese art and culture. In Authentically African, Sarah Van Beurden traces the relationship between the possession, definition, and display of art and the construction of cultural authenticity and political legitimacy from the late colonial until the postcolonial era. Her study of the interconnected histories of these two institutions is the first history of an art museum in Africa, and the only work of its kind in English. Drawing on Flemish-language sources other scholars have been unable to access, Van Beurden illuminates the politics of museum collections, showing how the IMNZ became a showpiece in Mobutu’s effort to revive “authentic” African culture. She reconstructs debates between Belgian and Congolese museum professionals, revealing how the dynamics of decolonization played out in the fields of the museum and international heritage conservation. Finally, she casts light on the art market, showing how the traveling displays put on by the IMNZ helped intensify collectors’ interest and generate an international market for Congolese art. The book contributes to the fields of history, art history, museum studies, and anthropology and challenges existing narratives of Congo’s decolonization. It tells a new history of decolonization as a struggle over cultural categories, the possession of cultural heritage, and the right to define and represent cultural identities.
Offering a wealth of perspectives on African modern and Modernist art from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, this new Companion features essays by African, European, and North American authors who assess the work of individual artists as well as exploring broader themes such as discoveries of new technologies and globalization. A pioneering continent-based assessment of modern art and modernity across Africa Includes original and previously unpublished fieldwork-based material Features new and complex theoretical arguments about the nature of modernity and Modernism Addresses a widely acknowledged gap in the literature on African Art
The first comprehensive book about the Washington, D.C., art world, this study features humorous and unique stories about the artists and art districts of one of the U.S.'s most visited cities. The city's many firsts include are the first modern art museum, the first African-American gallery, and the first art fair. Important in the feminist art movement, it hosted the opening of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Chapters are arranged by decade beginning with 1900, and highlight trends in portraits and landscapes, galleries and museums, nonprofits, cooperatives, art fairs, family stories and the Artomatic experience.
