Art and Risk in Ancient Yoruba
Art and Risk in Ancient Yoruba

Author: Suzanne Preston Blier

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-11-02

Total Pages: 793

ISBN-13: 1107729173

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In this book, Suzanne Preston Blier examines the intersection of art, risk and creativity in early African arts from the Yoruba center of Ife and the striking ways that ancient Ife artworks inform society, politics, history and religion. Yoruba art offers a unique lens into one of Africa's most important and least understood early civilizations, one whose historic arts have long been of interest to local residents and Westerners alike because of their tour-de-force visual power and technical complexity. Among the complementary subjects explored are questions of art making, art viewing and aesthetics in the famed ancient Nigerian city-state, as well as the attendant risks and danger assumed by artists, patrons and viewers alike in certain forms of subject matter and modes of portrayal, including unique genres of body marking, portraiture, animal symbolism and regalia. This volume celebrates art, history and the shared passion and skill with which the remarkable artists of early Ife sought to define their past for generations of viewers.

African Cultures, Visual Arts, and the Museum
African Cultures, Visual Arts, and the Museum

Author: Tobias Döring

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9789042013100

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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.

Sculptures
Sculptures

Author: Musée du quai Branly

Publisher: Reunion Des Musees Nationaux

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 488

ISBN-13:

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Pending the opening of the Musee du Quai Branly in 2004, this Pavillon des Sessions display represents the first step towards realising the ambition stated by the President of the Republic: namely to endow France with a modern institution dedicated to the arts and civilisations of Africa, Asia, the Pacific Islands and the Americas."--BOOK JACKET.

Arts of Vanuatu
Arts of Vanuatu

Author: Joël Bonnemaison

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 1996-01-01

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 9780824819569

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This prodigiously diverse and living culture has for its spiritual source a single traditional vision central to which is the fact that the world belongs not to the living, but to the ancestors. In Vanuatu art we have the construction of canoes and of standing slit-drums, the inventiveness apparent in the masks and mats, the aesthetics of dress, the raising of tusker pigs, the sharing out of sea-turtle meat, the symbol of the hawk representing the outward sign of the possession of the world through the eyes of the departed. This art, sacred in inspiration, takes root in the magic of each place and shore. Arts of Vanuatu is the first major contemporary anthropology work covering such a range of topics. It is also the first work covering the traditional art of the former South Pacific island colony of the New Hebrides.

African Dream Machines
African Dream Machines

Author: Anitra Nettleton

Publisher: Wits University Press

Published: 2007-10-01

Total Pages: 486

ISBN-13: 1868144585

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African Dream Machines takes African headrests out of the category of functional objects and into the more rarefied category of ‘art’ objects. Styles in African headrests are usually defined in terms of western art and archaeological discourses, but this book interrogates these definitions of style and demonstrates the shortcomings of defining a single formal style model as exclusive to a single ethnic group. Among the artefacts made by southern African peoples, headrests were the best known. Anitra Nettleton’s study of the uses and forms of headrests opened up a number of art-historical methodologies in the attempt to gain an understanding of form, style and content in African art objects. Her drawings of each and every headrest encountered become a major part of the project.

Museums in Postcolonial Europe
Museums in Postcolonial Europe

Author: Dominic Thomas

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-09-13

Total Pages: 151

ISBN-13: 1317987756

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The history of European nation-building and identity formation is inextricably connected with museums, and the role they play in displaying the acquired spoils and glorious symbols of geopolitical power in order to mobilize public support for expansionist ventures. This book examines the contemporary debate surrounding the museum in postcolonial Europe. Although there is no consensus on the European colonial experience, the process of decolonization in Europe has involved an examination of the museum’s place, and ethnic minorities and immigrants have insisted upon improved representation in the genealogies of European nation-states. Museological practices have been subjected to greater scrutiny in light of these political and social transformations. In addition to the refurbishment and restructuring of colonial-era museums, new spaces have also been inaugurated to highlight the contemporary importance of museums in postcolonial Europe, as well as the significance of incorporating the perspective of postcolonial European populations into these spaces. This book includes contributions from leading experts in their fields and represents a comparative trans-historical and transcolonial examination which contextualises and reinterpretates to the legacies and experiences of European museums. This book was published as a special issue of Africa and Black Diaspora: An International Journal.

Art History and Anthropology
Art History and Anthropology

Author: Peter Probst

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 2023-12-12

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1606068792

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An in-depth and nuanced look at the complex relationship between two dynamic fields of study. While today we are experiencing a revival of world art and the so-called global turn of art history, encounters between art historians and anthropologists remain rare. Even after a century and a half of interactions between these epistemologies, a skeptical distance prevails with respect to the disciplinary other. This volume is a timely exploration of the roots of this complex dialogue, as it emerged worldwide in the colonial and early postcolonial periods, between 1870 and 1970. Exploring case studies from Australia, Austria, Brazil, France, Germany, and the United States, this volume addresses connections and rejections between art historians and anthropologists—often in the contested arena of “primitive art.” It examines the roles of a range of figures, including the art historian–anthropologist Aby Warburg, the modernist artist Tarsila do Amaral, the curator-impresario Leo Frobenius, and museum directors such as Alfred Barr and René d’Harnoncourt. Entering the current debates on decolonizing the past, this collection of essays prompts reflection on future relations between these two fields.

Neocolonialism and Built Heritage
Neocolonialism and Built Heritage

Author: Daniel E. Coslett

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-07-02

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0429769512

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Architectural relics of nineteenth and twentieth-century colonialism dot cityscapes throughout our globalizing world, just as built traces of colonialism remain embedded within the urban fabric of many European capitals. Neocolonialism and Built Heritage addresses the sustained presence and influence of historic built environments and processes inherited from colonialism within the contemporary lives of cities in Africa, Asia, and Europe. Novel in their focused consideration of ways in which these built environments reinforce neocolonialist connections among former colonies and colonizers, states and international organizations, the volume’s case studies engage highly relevant issues such as historic preservation, heritage management, tourism, toponymy, and cultural imperialism. Interrogating the life of the past in the present, authors thus challenge readers to consider the roles played by a diversity of historic built environments in the ongoing asymmetrical balance of power and unequal distribution capital around the globe. They present buildings’ maintenance, management, reuse, and (re)interpretation, and in so doing they raise important questions, the ramifications of which transcend the specifics of the individual sites and architectural histories they present.

The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966
The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966

Author: David Murphy

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 1781383162

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In April 1966, thousands of artists, musicians, performers and writers from across Africa and its diaspora gathered in the Senegalese capital, Dakar, to take part in the First World Festival of Negro Arts (Premier Festival Mondial des arts nègres). The international forum provided by the Dakar Festival showcased a wide array of arts and was attended by such celebrated luminaries as Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker, Aimé Césaire, André Malraux and Wole Soyinka. Described by Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor, as 'the elaboration of a new humanism which this time will include all of humanity on the whole of our planet earth', the festival constituted a highly symbolic moment in the era of decolonization and the push for civil rights for black people in the United States. In essence, the festival sought to perform an emerging Pan-African culture, that is, to give concrete cultural expression to the ties that would bind the newly liberated African 'homeland' to black people in the diaspora. This volume is the first sustained attempt to provide not only an overview of the festival itself but also of its multiple legacies, which will help us better to understand the 'festivalization' of Africa that has occurred in recent decades with most African countries now hosting a number of festivals as part of a national tourism and cultural development strategy.

Cloth in West African History
Cloth in West African History

Author: Colleen E. Kriger

Publisher: Rowman Altamira

Published: 2006-06-08

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 0759114234

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In this holistic approach to the study of textiles and their makers, Colleen Kriger charts the role cotton has played in commercial, community, and labor settings in West Africa. By paying close attention to the details of how people made, exchanged, and wore cotton cloth from before industrialization in Europe to the twentieth century, she is able to demonstrate some of the cultural effects of Africa's long involvement in trading contacts with Muslim societies and with Europe. Cloth in West African History thus offers a fresh perspective on the history of the region and on the local, regional, and global processes that shaped it. A variety of readers will find its account and insights into the African past and culture valuable, and will appreciate the connections made between the local concerns of small-scale weavers in African villages, the emergence of an indigenous textile industry, and its integration into international networks.