Kumasi Realism, 1951-2007

Kumasi Realism, 1951-2007

Author: Atta Kwami

Publisher: Hurst & Company

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781849040877

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This text explores a burgeoning body of West African artistic production that draws upon photography, advertising, graphic design, European art history and Ghanaian history and culture.


A Companion to Modern African Art

A Companion to Modern African Art

Author: Gitti Salami

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-12-24

Total Pages: 650

ISBN-13: 1444338374

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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 A pioneering continent-based assessment of modern art and modernity across Africa Includes original and previously unpublished fieldwork-based material Features new and complex theoretical arguments about the nature of modernity and Modernism Addresses a widely acknowledged gap in the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


Tangible Things

Tangible Things

Author: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015-02-06

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0199382298

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In a world obsessed with the virtual, tangible things are once again making history. Tangible Things invites readers to look closely at the things around them, ordinary things like the food on their plate and extraordinary things like the transit of planets across the sky. It argues that almost any material thing, when examined closely, can be a link between present and past. The authors of this book pulled an astonishing array of materials out of storage--from a pencil manufactured by Henry David Thoreau to a bracelet made from iridescent beetles--in a wide range of Harvard University collections to mount an innovative exhibition alongside a new general education course. The exhibition challenged the rigid distinctions between history, anthropology, science, and the arts. It showed that object-centered inquiry inevitably leads to a questioning of categories within and beyond history. Tangible Things is both an introduction to the range and scope of Harvard's remarkable collections and an invitation to reassess collections of all sorts, including those that reside in the bottom drawers or attics of people's houses. It interrogates the nineteenth-century categories that still divide art museums from science museums and historical collections from anthropological displays and that assume history is made only from written documents. Although it builds on a larger discussion among specialists, it makes its arguments through case studies, hoping to simultaneously entertain and inspire. The twenty case studies take us from the Galapagos Islands to India and from a third-century Egyptian papyrus fragment to a board game based on the twentieth-century comic strip "Dagwood and Blondie." A companion website catalogs the more than two hundred objects in the original exhibition and suggests ways in which the principles outlined in the book might change the way people understand the tangible things that surround them.


What Is African Art?

What Is African Art?

Author: Peter Probst

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2022-12-06

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 022679329X

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A history of the evolving field of African art. This book examines the invention and development of African art as an art historical category. It starts with a simple question: What do we mean when we talk about African art? By confronting the historically shifting answers to this question, Peter Probst identifies “African art” as a conceptual vessel that manifests wider societal transformations. What Is African Art? covers three key stages in the field’s history. Starting with the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, the book first discusses the colonial formation of the field by focusing on the role of museums, collectors, and photography in disseminating visual cultures as relations of power. It then explores the remaking of the field at the dawn of African independence with the shift toward contemporary art and the rise of Black Atlantic studies in the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, it examines the post- and decolonial reconfiguration of the field driven by questions of representation, repair, and restitution.


Qayrawān

Qayrawān

Author: William Gallois

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2024-04-04

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0271096160

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In the last years of the nineteenth century, the Tunisian city of Qayrawān suddenly found itself covered in murals. Concentrated on and around the city’s Great Mosque, these monumental artworks were only visible for about fifty years, from the 1880s through the 1930s. This book investigates the fascinating history of who created these outdoor paintings and why. Using visual archaeological methods, William Gallois reconstructs the visual history of these works and vividly brings them back to life. He locates pictorial records of the murals from the backdrops of photographs, postcards, and other forms of European ephemera. In Qayrawān, he identifies a form of religious painting that transposed traditional aesthetic forms such as house decoration, embroidery, and tattooing—which lay exclusively within the domains of women—onto the body of a conquered city. Gallois argues that these works were created by women as a form of “emergency art,” intended to offer amuletic protection for the community, and demonstrates how they differ markedly from “classical” Islamic antecedents and modern modes of Arab cultural production in the Middle East and North Africa. Based on extensive archival research, this study is both a record of a unique moment in the history of art and a challenge to rethink the spiritual force and agency of a group of anonymous female artists whose paintings aspired to help save the world at a time of great peril. It will be welcomed by scholars of art history, Islamic studies, Middle East studies, and the history of magic.


Mercenaries, Pirates, Bandits and Empires

Mercenaries, Pirates, Bandits and Empires

Author: Alejandro Colás

Publisher:

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780231702089

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"The following book had its origins in a workshop entitled 'Pirates, Bandits, Mercenaries and Terrorists: Privatised Violence in Historical Context', held at Queen Mary, University of London on 23 May, 2008"--Introd.


Made in Africa

Made in Africa

Author: Carol Newman

Publisher: Brookings Institution Press

Published: 2016-02-23

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 0815728166

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Why is there so little industry in Africa? Over the past forty years, industry has moved from the developed to the developing world, yet Africa’s share of global manufacturing has fallen from about 3 percent in 1970 to less than 2 percent in 2014. Industry is important to low-income countries. It is good for economic growth, job creation, and poverty reduction. Made in Africa: Learning to Compete in Industry outlines a new strategy to help African industry compete in global markets. This book draws on case studies and econometric and qualitative research from Africa and emerging Asia to understand what drives firm-level competitiveness in low-income countries. The results show that while traditional concerns such as infrastructure, skills, and the regulatory environment are important, they alone will not be sufficient for Africa to industrialize. The book also addresses how industrialization strategies will need to adapt to the region’s growing resource abundance.


Fragments of the Afghan Frontier

Fragments of the Afghan Frontier

Author: Magnus Marsden

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780231702461

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The border between Afghanistan and Pakistan's northwest territories has a long and violent past. Through a collage of historical narrative and ethnographic research, Magnus Marsden and Benjamin D. Hopkins disprove the stereotypes and simplistic assessments that obscure a truer picture of the frontier, exposing the web of difficulties now facing local and international actors. This border region is anything but an isolated depot filled with radical terrorists and tribesmen. The frontier is rich with meaning, determined by centuries of movement by its inhabitants and their conceptions of those who operate outside their world. Fragments of the Afghan Frontiergives readers a deeper understanding of an evolving region that grows ever more significant as the West enhances its counterterrorist campaigns.


Witnesses to History

Witnesses to History

Author: Lyndel V. Prott

Publisher: UNESCO

Published: 2009-01-01

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 9231041282

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This Compendium gives an outline of the historical, philosophical and ethical aspects of the return of cultural objects (e.g. cultural objects displaced during war or in colonial contexts), cites past and present cases (Maya Temple Facade, Nigerian Bronzes, United States of America v. Schultz, Parthenon Marbles and many more) and analyses legal issues (bona fide, relevant UNESCO and UNIDROIT Conventions, Supreme Court Decisions, procedure for requests etc.). It is a landmark publication that bears testament to the ways in which peoples have lost their entire cultural heritage and analyses the issue of its return and restitution by providing a wide range of perspectives on this subject. Essential reading for students, specialists, scholars and decision-makers as well as those interested in these topics.


A Companion to Textile Culture

A Companion to Textile Culture

Author: Jennifer Harris

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2020-09-16

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 1118768906

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A lively and innovative collection of new and recent writings on the cultural contexts of textiles The study of textile culture is a dynamic field of scholarship which spans disciplines and crosses traditional academic boundaries. A Companion to Textile Culture is an expertly curated compendium of new scholarship on both the historical and contemporary cultural dimensions of textiles, bringing together the work of an interdisciplinary team of recognized experts in the field. The Companion provides an expansive examination of textiles within the broader area of visual and material culture, and addresses key issues central to the contemporary study of the subject. A wide range of methodological and theoretical approaches to the subject are explored—technological, anthropological, philosophical, and psychoanalytical, amongst others—and developments that have influenced academic writing about textiles over the past decade are discussed in detail. Uniquely, the text embraces archaeological textiles from the first millennium AD as well as contemporary art and performance work that is still ongoing. This authoritative volume: Offers a balanced presentation of writings from academics, artists, and curators Presents writings from disciplines including histories of art and design, world history, anthropology, archaeology, and literary studies Covers an exceptionally broad chronological and geographical range Provides diverse global, transnational, and narrative perspectives Included numerous images throughout the text to illustrate key concepts A Companion to Textile Culture is an essential resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, instructors, and researchers of textile history, contemporary textiles, art and design, visual and material culture, textile crafts, and museology.