African Art and Agency in the Workshop

Product Description


The role of the workshop in the creation of African art is the subject of this revelatory book. In the group setting of the workshop, innovation and imitation collide, artists share ideas and techniques, and creative expression flourishes. African Art and Agency in the Workshop examines the variety of workshops, from those which are politically driven or tourist oriented, to those based on historical patronage or allied to current artistic trends. Fifteen lively essays explore the impact of the workshop on the production of artists such as Zimbabwean stone sculptors, master potters from Cameroon, wood carvers from Nigeria, and others from across the continent.


Review


"This interesting volume is highly recommended, especially for institutions that have collections covering artistic practice, African studies, postcolonial studies, and art history." ―ARLIS/NA Reviews


"Taken as a whole, the case studies provide a wide window into the very diverse structural and functional characteristics of workshops. They also clearly describe how African workshops have served both contemporary political and cultural needs and have responded to patronage, whether it be traditional or stimulated by tourism. Equally important, some of the case studies demonstrate that diversity of forms can thrive within workshop organizations propelled by individual creativity and a desire to self-differentiate." ―African Studies Review


"Mozambican freedom fighters direct artistic cooperatives to anti-colonial ends. An entrepreneurial Zambian king "brands" his people through patronage of distinctive visual and performance arts. These and equally compelling case studies demonstrate how African workshops have long mediated collective expression and individual imagination. In their nuanced contextualization of "the workshop" across cultural, geographical, and temporal diversities, the editors frame apprenticeship, cultural constructions of creativity, pragmatic materiality, and phenomenologies of production as no Africanist art historians have before, and in ways applicable anywhere in the world." ―Allen F. Roberts,, University of California, Los Angeles


"A closer examination of the workshop provides important insights into art histories and cultural politics. We may think we know what we mean when we use the term 'workshop,' but in fact the organization of groups of artists takes on vastly different forms and encourages the production of diverse styles of art within larger social structures and power dynamics." ―Victoria Rovine, University of Florida


"[These] essays are augmented with data from fieldwork done by the editors in Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Nigeria, Kenya, and Tanzania. To make the volume as formidable as it stands, chapters have been added by the coeditors’ intellectual colleagues who have conducted fieldwork in the above-named countries, as well as in Uganda, Mozambique, Zambia, and South Africa." ―Africa Today


About the Author


Sidney Littlefield Kasfir is Professor Emerita of Art History at Emory University. She is author of African Art and the Colonial Encounter (IUP, 2007).
Till Förster is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel.