Showing papers in "Critical interventions in 2018"
TL;DR: At the turn of the twentieth century, numerous European and American adventurers, entrepreneurs, missionaries, colonial agents, and a few intrepid scientists and explorers, converged in the...
Abstract: At the turn of the twentieth century, numerous European and American adventurers, entrepreneurs, missionaries, colonial agents, and a few intrepid scientists and explorers, converged in the...
9 citations
TL;DR: This article defined African Modernism as a distinct period in African art history, ranging roughly from the early 1920s through the late 1980s (e.g. Deliss, 1995; Hug, 1997; Grabski-Ochsne, 1998).
Abstract: African Modernism has been defined by scholars as a distinct period in African art history, ranging roughly from the early 1920s through the late 1980s (e.g. Deliss, 1995; Hug, 1997; Grabski-Ochsne...
8 citations
TL;DR: One Tribe, One Style: Paradigms in the Historiography of African Art as discussed by the authors, a paradigm-breaking article that concretized the alternative of a one-tribe, one-style approach.
Abstract: In 1984, Sidney Kasfir published a paradigm-breaking article titled “One Tribe, One Style?: Paradigms in the Historiography of African Art.” In it, she “effectively concretized the alternative of a...
7 citations
TL;DR: The spatialization of Africa is fraught, and places within Africa tend to be stereotyped by geographies of morality and simplistic rural/urban divides as mentioned in this paper, and the spatial, cultural, and politi...
Abstract: The spatialization of Africa is fraught, and places within Africa tend to be stereotyped by geographies of morality and simplistic rural/urban divides. Focusing on the spatial, cultural, and politi...
7 citations
TL;DR: In the mid-1990s, Archive Fever (1995) sparked a lively theoretical debate that focused on practices of reading the archive, the relationship of the archive to power, and the...
Abstract: In the mid-1990s, Jacques Derrida’s book Archive Fever (1995) sparked a lively theoretical debate that focused on practices of reading the archive, the relationship of the archive to power, and the...
6 citations
Abstract: After the dominant popularity of early studio photography among African art scholars, curators, and dealers, the official photographic agencies that flourished on the continent after World War II b...
6 citations
TL;DR: For two decades, scholars have focused their attention toward contemporary urban expressions but have largely overlooked the masquerade arts of African cities, outside of their importation from rura....
Abstract: For two decades, scholars have turned their attention toward contemporary urban expressions but have largely overlooked the masquerade arts of African cities, outside of their importation from rura...
5 citations
TL;DR: Provenance has become crucially important in the Western market for historical African sculpture, and as a consequence individual African artists have been erased in favor of an emphasis on the dea...
Abstract: Provenance has become crucially important in the Western market for historical African sculpture, and as a consequence individual African artists have been erased in favor of an emphasis on the dea...
4 citations
TL;DR: This paper focused on recovering the partly destroyed archive of Malian photographer Felix Diallo (1931-1997), who was active between the mid 1950s and the mid-1980s in Kita, a small town in rura...
Abstract: This article focuses on recovering the partly destroyed archive of Malian photographer Felix Diallo (1931–1997), who was active between the mid-1950s and the mid-1980s in Kita, a small town in rura...
4 citations
3 citations
TL;DR: Using the notion of centers and peripheries, Girshick explores the emergence of the collecting and marketing of African art in South Africa as discussed by the authors, and finds that South Africans have been players in a broader mark...
Abstract: Using the notion of centers and peripheries, Paula Girshick explores the emergence of the collecting and marketing of African art in South Africa. South Africans have been players in a broader mark...
TL;DR: Rural and urban spaces in Africa, art historians are increasingly finding, are bound to one another by webs of complex relationships, resulting in a blurring of boundaries long held to be structura...
Abstract: Rural and urban spaces in Africa, art historians are increasingly finding, are bound to one another by webs of complex relationships, resulting in a blurring of boundaries long held to be structura...
TL;DR: In Uganda, rural-urban and art-craft categories are used, carrying value judgments that assign indigenous art forms to rural practitioners and art to urban artists as discussed by the authors, and artists are assigned to rural and urban categories, respectively.
Abstract: In Uganda, rural–urban and art–craft categories are used, carrying value judgments that assign indigenous art forms to rural practitioners and art to urban. Artist Fred Kato Mutebi’s practice break...
TL;DR: As Blouin and Rosenberg wrote, photo archives function as complex structures, processes, and epistemologies situated at the critical point of intersection between scholarship, cultural practices, and information as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: As Blouin and Rosenberg wrote, photo archives function “as complex structures, processes, and epistemologies situated at the critical point of intersection between scholarship, cultural practices, ...
TL;DR: Within the context of this special issue on African art markets, this artist's profile brings to the fore transforming and increasingly fractured contexts of artistic production and consumption as discussed by the authors. But, the focus of this article was not on the work of this artist.
Abstract: Within the context of this special issue on African art markets, this artist's profile brings to the fore transforming and increasingly fractured contexts of artistic production and consumption. In...
TL;DR: The authors traces the trajectories of a selection of images first taken by, and then by, Somali men and women from the Horn of Africa from the late 19th century to the present.
Abstract: This article traces the trajectories of a selection of images first taken of, and then by, Somali men and women from the Horn of Africa from the late 19th century to the present. The study of the c...
TL;DR: In the summer of 2017, the Centre for African Studies at the University of Basel in Switzerland hosted the seventh European Conference on African Studies (ECAS7) with the theme Urban Africa - Urban...
Abstract: In the summer of 2017, the Centre for African Studies at the University of Basel in Switzerland hosted the seventh European Conference on African Studies (ECAS7) with the theme Urban Africa – Urban...
TL;DR: In the early 1920s, George Way Harley, the son of a Methodist minister, began collecting Liberian masks and other artifacts from the Dan, Mano, and various other ethnic groups in the region.
Abstract: Growing up in Asheville, North Carolina, George Way Harley, the son of a Methodist minister, dreamed of becoming someday a medical missionary in the tradition of his childhood hero David Livingstone. He prepared for this work diligently, beginning in 1912, when he enrolled in Trinity College (what is today Duke University) to pursue a degree in biology. After graduation, Harley taught for a brief time high school science, and then went on to Yale University to complete his medical diploma in 1923. His marriage to Winifred Frances Jewell later that year, and his acceptance for missionary work by the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, set in motion what would become, beginning in 1925, a lifetime spent in Ganta— one of the most rural mission outposts in northeastern Liberia, bordering Guinea to the north and a short distance from Côte d’Ivoire to the east (G. W. Harley, 1924). Over a 35-year period in rural Liberia, between 1925 and 1960, Harley would come to amass one of the largest, and arguably most important, collections of masks and associated cultural artifacts from the Dan, Mano, and various other ethnic groups in the region (Wells, 1977). How and when did George Harley begin collecting Liberian masks and other artifacts? What motivated him to acquire these objects of material culture? And did his interest or appreciation of African objects change over time? These are critical questions one would want to know to better understand Harley’s reasons to collect indigenous cultural artifacts, and also to better explain his decision to sell—first to an ethnographic museum in the 1930s and 1940s and later, in the 1950s, to private collectors of African art. But George Harley’s letters and journals are, in general, sparse and dogged with long pauses and silences that would frustrate any biographer. Thus the answers to these questions can only be pieced together from incomplete scraps of information and by connecting the dots of an imperfect historic record. From research that I conducted at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, I know now that the very first object Harley acquired in Ganta was a Fulani herder’s hat. Records indicate that it was purchased in 1926 from an itinerant Muslim trader. Beyond that, however, there is little documentation recording Harley’s initial efforts to acquire artifacts; nor do the archives reveal much about his familiarity with contemporaneous scholarship in, what would have then been called in the United States, the field of primitive art studies. Collecting “native” artifacts was certainly not part of Harley’s training as a Methodist missionary at the Kennedy School of Missions of Hartford Seminary, which he attended in 1924 just prior to his departure for Liberia. In fact, one of the only documented encounters that Harley seems to have had with African artifacts, prior to his travels to Africa, was a brief (one hour) visit to the ethnographic halls of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City in
TL;DR: A great part of the history of Africa has been determined by the movement of peoples in time and space as discussed by the authors, especially the migration from rural to urban areas instigated during the colonisation of Africa.
Abstract: A great part of the history of Africa has been determined by the movement of peoples in time and space. Those movements, especially the migration from rural to urban areas instigated during the col...
TL;DR: In this article, Critical Interventions is dedicated to rethinking the dialectics of the rural and the urban in African art and scholarship, inspired by the general theme of the European Conference of...
Abstract: This issue of Critical Interventions is dedicated to rethinking the dialectics of the rural and the urban in African art and scholarship. Inspired by the general theme of the European Conference of...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on the metamorphosis of asafo flags from layered and complex performative artworks to objets d'art circulating on the international art market and featured in museum exhibitions.
Abstract: ABSTRACT This essay focuses on the metamorphosis of asafo flags from layered and complex performative artworks to objets d'art circulating on the international art market and featured in museum exhibitions. While the trajectory outlined is common to many African art objects, the relatively recent history traced in this case study makes it possible to identify the players that have contributed to this specific semantic transformation and reflect on their roles. The increased international visibility of asafo flags on the one hand affected the monetary value of these objects on the market, on the other, generated interesting creative feedbacks on the local and global art scene. By connecting these two spheres of circulation and value the essay challenges a dichotomic understanding of African art objects and argues for more layered and complex object biographies.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors studied the social biographies of specific African artworks and enriched their understanding of their social relationships, the network of relationships the art objects forged as they travelled through time and space.
Abstract: Recent studies of specific African artworks have enriched our understanding of their social biographies, the network of relationships the art objects forged as they travelled through time and space...