A Companion to Modern African Art - (Blackwell Companions to Art History) by Gitti Salami & Monica Blackmun Visona (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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• Includes original and previously unpublished fieldwork-based material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

From the Back Cover

This fresh addition to the Wiley Blackwell Companions to Art History series provides a much-needed perspective on the art and artists of Africa and prepares the ground for a fruitful debate on the nature of African Modernist art, often informed by a conscious engagement with European Modernism. The 29 essays that constitute this volume offer a wealth of analytical approaches, particularly those relating to African epistemologies and postcolonial theory. They cover nineteenth century photography in Liberia, early twentieth century debates on the arts in Egypt, pan-Africanism and art education in Ghana, Uganda and Senegal, revolutionary painting in Algeria and Côte d'Ivoire, and African patronage of North Korean design firms, among many other topics. Contributors also analyze broader themes such as the critical reception African artists have encountered abroad, the roles of biennales and festivals, and interface between African artists and the African diaspora.

Featuring original work by authors from Africa, Europe, and North America, the case studies explore Africa's centuries-old interaction with modernity, tracing the influences of the Indian Ocean trade, as well as visual forms crossing the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. The volume's extended historical purview grounds the work of contemporary artists in the innovations and inventions of nineteenth and twentieth century Africa, material that is often overlooked by publications that situate such artists solely in non-African contexts. It showcases the richness and variety of the continent's visual creativity and adds much to the theoretical debate in emerging studies of global modernism.

Gitti Salami and Monica Blackmun Visonà

About the Author

Gitti Salami is Associate Professor of Art History at Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, USA. In a decade of extensive field research in south-eastern Nigeria she has published numerous articles on Yakurr culture in African Arts and Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture. She has been awarded a Fulbright-Hays DDRA fellowship and a grant from the West African Research Association (WARA), and has held resident fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution and the University of East Anglia, UK. Her forthcoming monograph examines contemporary Yakurr art genres from a postcolonial theoretical standpoint.

Monica Blackmun Visonà is Associate Professor in the School of Art and Visual Studies of the University of Kentucky, USA, where she teaches courses on African art and architecture, and art historical methods. The principle author of A History of Art in Africa (2000, 2008), she has also published Constructing African Art Histories for the Lagoons of Côte d'Ivoire (2010), and contributed articles to Art Bulletin and African Arts. She is currently researching the artists of the western Akan peoples for a museum exhibition.