Africa and the Renaissance: Art in Ivory

Bassani, Ezio

Arts & Photography

Museum for African Art

Published with the Center for African Art, NYC, this handsome, large (9x12

Wild Spirits, Strong Medicine: African Art and the Wilderness

Martha G. Anderson

Christine Mullen Kreamer

Likeness and Beyond: Portraits from Africa and the World

Borgatti, Jean

BRILLIANT, Richard

Closeup: Lessons in the Art of Seeing African Sculpture from an American Collection and the Horstmann Collection

Thompson, Jerry L.

Vogel, Susan

Africa Explores: Twentieth Century African Art

Susan Vogel

Ima Ebong

A stunning collection of essays and photos of artwork, published by the Museum for African Art, 593 Broadway, New York, NY 10012, in conjunction with an exhibition organized and presented by the Museum. New interest has been ignited in looking at African art for its ideas for the visual expression of "solutions that African civilizations have invented to problems that still vex us problems of the environment, of healing, of social and spiritual strength and cohesion these African ideas now attract and surprise with the power that African sculptural forms did in the early century..." (from the introductory essay). The theme of secrecy is profound and far reaching. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Secrecy: African Art That Conceals and Reveals

Nooter, Mary H.

History & Criticism

<p>Robert Farris Thompson, Professor of the History of African and African-American Art at Yale University, has been working on this study of African-Atlantic altars for twenty-five years. Face of the Gods is based on fieldwork in both Africa and the Americas - in Mali, Ghana, Benin, Nigeria, Zaire, the Central African Republic, Angola, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, on the eastern part of the Atlantic, and in Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Suriname, the United States, Brazil, and Argentina, on the western. The book shows how the Africans and their descendants in the three continents worship not only before points of reverence, foci of sacrifice and prayer, but also, in certain areas, through sacred happening climaxed by possession. In the Afro-Atlantic world the concept "altar" is double: fixed (tree, fire, stone, dais) and moving (ring shouts, dancing, handclapping, circling, ecstasy), leading ultimately to visitation by healing spirits under God. Face of the Gods is an introduction, the first in any language, to a brand-new field in art history: the comparative study of Afro-Atlantic altars. Tracing icons and philosophies in altar-making from major African civilizations to the Americas, the book restores many works of art, long considered in isolation from each other, to their original constellating power. Face of the Gods is richly illustrated with full-color plates. The book opens with the fire altars of the foraging Mbuti, of the Ituri Forest in northeastern Zaire, and of the San, of Namibia. Next it describes minkisi, the extraordinary medicines of God still made in Kongo and the Kongo-influenced civilizations of Central Africa. The minkisi tradition, Thompson shows, traveled intact acrossthe Atlantic. In Havana as in the Bronx, it expands in altars to Afro-Cuban deities such as Sarabanda, its complex symbolic constructions sometimes artfully contained in as small and secret a place as an apartment closet. Likewise derived from Kongo belief are Brazilian tree-alta</p>

Face of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americas

Thompson, Robert F.

<p>Since the Museum of African Art's founding ten years ago, the ability of museums to neutrally present any art-and especially art as contested as Africa's-has been increasingly challenged. Art objects are its central raison d'etre, but the Museum of African Art has become known for its inquiries into the acts of presenting and looking at African Art. The meanings of the artworks in Africa were multiple and open to debate; however, as were the methods of contextualizing them in museums. Both these arenas still demand research and investigation today. Exhibition-ism is one such investigation, an exhibition that mirrors the process of conceiving and constructing an exhibition.</p>

Exhibition-ism: Museums and African Art

Mary Nooter Roberts

Animals in African Art: From the Familiar to the Marvelous

Animal images are so common in African art, and their meanings and purposes assumed to be so obvious, that they are taken for granted. Indeed, Animals in African Art is the first major book wholly dedicated to the subject. Once the animals in African art are looked at more closely, important questions arise. Why is it that from the astounding diversity of life-forms in Africa, so very few animals are chosen as subjects of visual and performative arts? Why are the animals that do appear repeatedly in African art so often so downright peculiar - even preposterous? And why do zoomorphic masks, figures, and other objects almost always refer to human being and purpose? In other words, why and how are animals such a useful, if purposefully distorting mirror of humanity? What does it mean to "become" a hyena or an eland by donning a mask or entering a trance? Indeed, what does it mean to be "human" or "animal, " in the first place? Answers to such questions are by no means as readily forthcoming as one might assume. To understand why and how some animals are so "good to think" (as well as good to eat) requires wending one's way along the sinuous paths of African logics. Emphasis is placed on the plural of this last word, for African systems of thought differ from one ethnic group to another, and often within each culture, from one interpreter to another. Different sense is also attributed to a given animal symbol by the same people through the course of time. There is certainly no easy explanation of why animals like snakes and penguins appear over and over again in the art of many peoples across the African continent, while others like rhinos, zebras, and giraffes rarely if ever do. Animals in African Art is a celebration of African cultural diversity, then, as well as the brilliance with which ideas are given form through plastic and performative arts.

Roberts, Allen F.

Museum for African Art (New York, N. Y.)

Thompson, Carol A.

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Books by Museum for African Art