Kente is not only the best known of all African textiles, it is also one of the most admired of all fabrics worldwide. Originating among the Asante peoples of Ghana and the Ewe peoples of Ghana and Togo, this brilliantly colored and intricately patterned strip-woven cloth was traditionally associated with royalty. Over time, however, it has come to be worn and used in many different contexts. In Wrapped in Pride, seven distinguished scholars present an exhaustive examination of the history of kente from its earliest use in Ghana to its present-day impact in the African Diaspora. Doran H. Ross is the former director of the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History.

Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity (UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History Textile Series)

Arts & Photography

Ross, Doran

History & Criticism

Fowler Museum at UCLA

A lasting contribution to the study of Japanese textiles and to the cultural history of the Inland Sea region, this volume presents a historical ethnography of the fishing villages that produced the sashiko no donza, or fishermanÕs coat. It provides as well an in-depth analysis of regional textile production, the sashiko tradition in the village of Hokudan, and the iconography of the eloquently stitched designs that appear on the coats. Sharon Sadako Takeda is senior curator and head of the Department of Costume and Textiles at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Luke Roberts is an associate professor of Japanese history at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Japanese Fishermen's Coats from Awaji Island (Textile Series, 5)

Roberts, Luke

Drawing upon diverse sources, including Daniel P. Biebuyck’s seminal fieldwork of the 1950s, Elisabeth Cameron investigates the culture and the art of the Lega peoples of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Among the Lega, art is only created for and used by the Bwami Society. Bwami is a complex organization consisting of multiple levels, and it forms an essential component of the political, social, and religious structure of the Lega. Within Bwami, artworks are used in conjunction with proverbs, anecdotes, and performances to form complex layered metaphors and to serve as mnemonic devices. As initiates move up through the ranks of the Bwami Society, a variety of different artworks assist them in recalling a vast corpus of complex aphorisms. The many beautiful examples of Lega artworks illustrated in this volume are drawn primarily from the Jay T. Last collection and include masks, animals, human forms, miniature tools, and spoons.

Art of the Lega

Cameron, Elisabeth L.

Born in Port-au-Prince in 1954, Haitian artist Edouard Duval-Carrie studied in Canada and at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris before settling in Miami where he continues to live and work. Divine Revolution presents sequined banners, canvases with ornate frames, and a dramatic altar, all demonstrating the profound influence of Vodou and Haiti’s complex cultural and political history. These works range in subject matter from celebrations and chronicles of the Haitian Revolution to examinations of the current plight of Haiti and its people. Duval-Carrie's art reveals a side of the Haitian experience that is not evident on the nightly news. The surreal starlit journeys of the Vodou deities and spirits who populate his paintings, juxtaposed with his carnivalesque portrayals of oppressive colonial and contemporary regimes, offer insight into the paradoxes of Haitian existence and the ambivalent nature of power itself, as well as a vision of the integrity of Haiti's ritual and spiritual practices.

Divine Revolution : the Paintings of Edouard Duval Carrié

Cosentino, Donald J.

Schooled in the fifteen-hundred-year-old painting tradition of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and ever sensitive to its narrative and iconographic requirements, Ethiopian artist Qes Adamu Tesfaw has managed to transcend the formulas that tradition requires him to embrace. By giving up the priesthood and turning to painting full-time, the artist has also found the freedom to venture outside the realm of religious subject matter to produce work that chronicles historical events both inside and outside Ethiopia, as well as scenes that depict the everyday life of his native country. Adamu's remarkable oeuvre includes saints on horseback, soldiers gathered in historic battles, Solomon and Sheba's courtship, and Ethiopians attending church or praying at mosques.

Painting Ethiopia: The Life and Work of Qes Adamu Tesfaw

Silverman, Raymond

Fire and light have long symbolized the relationship of human beings to the universe and its creators. In South and Southeast Asia and the Himalayas, the lamp, as a bearer of light, came to be perceived as a vehicle through which the divine could be accessed. The design, construction, and use of the lamp in these regions have been synonymous with the faith of the devotee since ancient times. Today the lamp continues to play a pivotal role in Hindu and Buddhist religious contexts, allowing the faithful to concentrate on the image or nature of the deity. The 76 remarkable metal lamps and incense burners illustrated in Flames of Devotion form the heart of a collection assembled by the preeminent scholar of Indian and Himalayan art Pratapaditya Pal and his wife, Chitralekha. They are noteworthy for their ingenious design and diverse crafting, as well as their iconographic richness. They represent fourteen states in India, a majority coming from Rajasthan and Gujarat in the west, the tribal areas in central Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, and the southern states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. In addition, stunning examples of lamps from Nepal and Tibet showcase the skill with which precious metals were employed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and a small selection of early incense burners and lamps from Cambodia, Indonesia, and Vietnam show the role these objects played in the ancient imagination. In an engaging and highly informative text, architect and art historian Sean Anderson investigates why lamps have endured and remain omnipresent in Hindu and Buddhist practice. While examining the historical importance of the lamp, Anderson emphasizes that as altar and tool, icon and fine sculpture, it is an evocative reminder of an undying devotion forged with the most common yet enigmatic of materials: metal and fire. He considers as well the liminal space the lamp occupies between the secular and the sacred in societies where it is often used to mark every event of significance from birth to death.

Flames of Devotion: Oil Lamps from South and Southeast Asia and the Himalayas

Anderson, Sean

In Makishi: Mask Characters of Zambia, Manuel Jordán reveals the beauty and complexity of the remarkable masquerade traditions of the Chokwe, Mbunda, Lunda, Lwena/Luvale, and Luchazi peoples who live in the “Three Corners” region of northwestern Zambia, northeastern Angola, and southwestern Democratic Republic of the Congo. The distinct yet overlapping mask types and styles used by these groups reflect their continual interaction and demonstrate the constant reformulation of visual and performance genres. Relations among peoples of the “Three Corners” are further complicated by recent refugee flows, and the masquerades that Jordán considers and vividly illustrates in his field photographs reflect histories of compromise and creative tension, as well as contemporary struggles for survival. While exquisite masks drawn from the Fowler Museum's collections demonstrate long use, Jordán shows how new characters can be created within earlier categories, so that basic dramatic plots are preserved while reference is made to new technologies, foreign encounters, and the dynamics of social interaction in a rapidly changing world. In many ways, as the author astutely argues, the masks are a performative mechanism used to explain, cope with, and, often enough, celebrate life's most difficult transitions and transformations. Makishi vibrantly documents the ability of theater to perpetuate tradition while providing an adaptive leading edge.

Makishi: Mask Characters of Zambia

Jordan, Manuel

Winner of the R. L. Shep Ethnic Textiles Award sponsored by the Textile Society of AmericaAsia is renowned for the production of fine handwoven cottons and luxurious silks -- important items of trade for centuries. In addition to these celebrated fabrics, however, weavers throughout the region produced cloth from ramie, hemp, pina, and banana fibers (including Philippine abaca and Okinawan ito basho), as well as a number of lesser-known plant fibers. Over the course of the twentieth century, many of these Asian plant fiber weaving traditions became marginalized or hovered on the brink of extinction, given the advent of synthetic fabrics, growing industrialization, and increased international textile trade. As the essays in this book testify, however, they have not vanished altogether. Rather, in recent times weavers have purposefully chosen to pursue various efforts directed at their preservation, revival, or reinvention. In many cases, the production of bast and leaf fiber textiles is now thriving in newly globalized situations.This volume presents eight essays documenting the current state of bast and leaf fiber weaving traditions in Vietnam, Borneo, Korea, Burma, Okinawa, the Philippines, Japan, and Micronesia. The processes that have nurtured or buffeted attempts to preserve or revive the production of these textiles are examined and abundantly illustrated with color photographs.

Material Choices: Refashioning Bast and Leaf Fibers in Asia and the Pacific (Fowler Museum Textile)

This book traces the visual cultures and histories of Mami Wata and other African water divinities. Mami Wata, often portrayed with the head and torso of a woman and the tail of a fish, is at once beautiful, jealous, generous, seductive, and potentially deadly. A water spirit widely known across Africa and the African diaspora, her origins are said to lie "overseas," although she has been thoroughly incorporated into local beliefs and practics. She can bring good fortune in the form of money, and her power increased between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, the era of growing international trade between Africa and the rest of the world. Her name, which may be translated as "Mother Water" or "Mistress Water," is pidgin English, a language developed to lubricate trade. Africans forcibly carried across the Atlantic as part of that "trade" brought with them their beliefs and practices honoring Mami Wata and other ancestral deities.

Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas

Drewal, Henry John

Antonio Pineda (b. 1919) is renowned for translating design elements evocative of Mexico's past into often-astounding modernist silver jewelry, sculpture, and tableware. Perhaps more than any of his talented counterparts, he has been able to abstract and refine, producing elegant, spare, and geometric works that evidence a profound respect for the wearer. Pineda was also instrumental in the formation of the Taxco School of silver design. The over two hundred remarkable Pineda objects illustrated in this volume reflect the artist's intense imagination and quest for technical perfection. While focusing on Pineda's art from the 1930s through the 1970s, author Gobi Stromberg also places his career and the development of the Taxco School in context. She considers how a particular set of historical, political, cultural, social, and economic factors facilitated meetings between Mexican and American artists, intellectuals, writers, Hollywood stars, and musicians; spawned the building of roads opening up remote Mexican villages to a growing influx of U.S. tourists and expatriates of every stripe; encouraged a focus upon Mexico's glorious Pre-Columbian heritage and the legacy of its indigenous peoples; and promoted the development of a unique system of production in the workshops of Taxco that made innovation and experimentation paramount. Stromberg and contributing essayist Ana Elena Mallet have in fact managed to untangle and address the multiple strands of influence that together resulted in an unprecedented period in silver design and execution, Taxco's Silver Age.

Silver Seduction: The Art of Mexican Modernist Antonio Pineda

Stromberg, Gobi

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