Ozioma Onuzulike

TL;DR: In this paper, a historical and critical narrative of the pottery experiments and ceramic art pedagogy in colonial Nigeria by the British artist and art teacher was presented, relying largely on archival sources.

TL;DR: A review of reports and debates on the history, structures and operations of art auctions in Nigeria to discuss their current impact on the development of contemporary art in the country can be found in this article.

Abstract: It has been shown that Africa’s cultural production continues to be presented to the wider world through the frames of methodologies and terminologies constructed and sustained by Eurocentric perceptions of creativity and alterity (see, for instance, Price, 2013; Abiodun, 2014). It has also been rightly noted that the study of African art has been “a product of Western sensibility and an expression of Western aesthetic responses to African visual culture” (Hassan, 1999, p. 217) and that “this proclivity has led to an unfortunate weakness in the study of African art because it has ignored the discovery, recognition, and analysis of African-derived paradigms” (Abiodun, 2014, p. 1). However, a number of paradigm-breaking publications have come on board since the last decade to address the problem. An important work that comes to mind is Salami & Vison a’s edited volume, A Companion to Modern African Art (2013), in which several contributors (especially Drewal (2013) and Sanyal (2013)) attempted to read Africa’s modern and contemporary cultural production not from a Eurocentric perspective but from an Africanist one, especially regarding the ways in which Africa has contributed to global modernism. Yet, following what appears to be the epistemological roots of the art history discipline, works that fall under the so-called craft category, especially what has been categorized as traditional pottery, have been marginalized in the examination of African art modernism (art that emerged essentially out of the colonial encounter in which African artists and designers have demonstrated an awareness of a wider creative field beyond their indigenous sources) as evident in such important studies as those by Beier, 1968; Kennedy, 1992; Ottenberg, 1997; Kasfir, 1999; Okeke-Agulu, 2001, 2015; Ogbechie, 2008; Enwezor & Okeke-Agulu, 2009. Two important compendia of scholarship on African pottery, representative of the thoughts and methodologies of leading scholars in the field, can be found in two special issues of the African Arts journal published in Los Angeles. These underscore the discursive and methodological tones, as well as scholarly interests, set for the discussion of African pottery in the last two decades. The first appeared in February 1989 as the outcome of the “African Ceramic Arts: History and Identity in Clay” panel held at the African Studies Association meeting in Denver, Colorado in 1987, which explored “how ceramic traditions contribute to our understanding of the roles, meanings, and history of art in Africa” (Berns, 1989a, p. 32). Five of the papers delivered at that panel constituted the 1989 African Arts special issue under the broad theme “Ceramic Arts in Africa” and with an introductory article of the same title by Marla C. Berns (1989a). Contributors to the volume (Berns, 1989b; Schildkrout, Hellman, & Keim, 1989; Smith, 1989; Spindel, 1989 and McIntosh, 1989) offered a wide ranging