Capturing the Spoor describes and discusses the virtually unknown rock art of the northernmost reaches of South Africa, in the area of the Central Limpopo Basin. The title of the book comes from the belief held by some traditional Bantu-speakers that the San can ‘capture’ animal spoor and bewitch it in order to ensure hunting success. The authors use this as an analogy for understanding the behavior of people in the past through the traces they leave behind.

This book describes the work of four distinct cultural groups: the San; Khoekhoen (Khoikhoin or ‘Hottentots’), Venda and Northern Sotho, and, most recently, people of European descent. Further, it discusses the interaction and connection between the four groups. It is the first substantial body of work from South Africa to focus on an area outside the Drakensberg, which has become synonymous with ‘southern African rock art’. Although the book focuses on a specific region, it introduces anthropological information from the Cape to the greater Kalahari region. The text is interspersed with first-hand accounts of Kalahari and Okavango San beliefs and rites and discussions with traditional Bantu-speaking peoples. A distillation of 14 years of field surveying and research in the Central Limpopo Basin, it targets the general reader who would like to know more about southern Africa’s rock art traditions, but at the same time addresses many academic concerns.

A simple narrative line and copious endnotes, respectively, ensure that both ‘lay’ and academic readers will find the subject interesting. The text is abundantly illustrated with line drawings and expressed through photographs. A list of rock art sites in Limpopo that are open to the public will be included.

This is a rare publication where information that is collected is analyzed with the help of knowledge and experience accumulated by the local indigenous communities, whose have been seldom heard in this context before.

Images of crosses, the Virgin Mary, and Christ, among other devotional objects, pervaded nearly every aspect of public and private life in early modern Spain, but they were also a point of contention between Christian and Muslim cultures. Writers of narrative fiction, theatre, and poetry were attuned to these debates, and religious imagery played an important role in how early modern writers chose to portray relations between Christians and Muslims. Drawing on a wide variety of literary genres as well as other textual and visual sources - including historical chronicles, travel memoirs, captives' testimonies, and paintings - Catherine Infante traces the references to religious visual culture and the responses they incited in cross-confessional negotiations. She reveals some of the anxieties about what it meant to belong to different ethnic or religious communities and how these communities interacted with each other within the fluid boundaries of the Mediterranean world. Focusing on the religious image as a point of contact between individuals of diverse beliefs and practices, The Arts of Encounter presents an original and necessary perspective on how Christian-Muslim relations were perceived and conveyed in print.

In April 1966, thousands of artists, musicians, performers and writers from across Africa and its diaspora gathered in the Senegalese capital, Dakar, to take part in the First World Festival of Negro Arts (Premier Festival Mondial des arts negres). The international forum provided by the Dakar Festival showcased a wide array of arts and was attended by such celebrated luminaries as Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker, Aime Cesaire, Andre Malraux and Wole Soyinka. Described by Senegalese President Leopold Sedar Senghor, as 'the elaboration of a new humanism which this time will include all of humanity on the whole of our planet earth', the festival constituted a highly symbolic moment in the era of decolonization and the push for civil rights for black people in the United States. In essence, the festival sought to perform an emerging Pan-African culture, that is, to give concrete cultural expression to the ties that would bind the newly liberated African 'homeland' to black people in the diaspora. This volume is the first sustained attempt to provide not only an overview of the festival itself but also of its multiple legacies, which will help us better to understand the 'festivalization' of Africa that has occurred in recent decades with most African countries now hosting a number of festivals as part of a national tourism and cultural development strategy.

In 1985, photographer and writer Vickie Jensen spent three months with Nisga'a artist Norman Tait and his crew of young carvers as they transformed a raw cedar log into a forty-two-foot totem pole for the BC Native Education Centre. Having spent years recovering the traditional knowledge that informed his carving, Tait taught his crew to make their own tools, carve, and design regalia, and together they practiced traditional stories and songs for the pole-raising ceremony. Totem Pole Carving shares two equally rich stories: the step-by-step work of carving and the triumph of Tait teaching his crew the skills and traditions necessary to create a massive cultural artifact. Jensen captures the atmosphere of the carving shed-the conversations and problem-solving, the smell of fresh cedar chips, the adzes and chainsaws, the blistered hands, the tension-relieving humor, the ever-present awareness of tradition, and the joy of creation. Generously illustrated with 125 striking photographs, and originally published as Where the People Gather, this second edition features a new preface from Jensen and an updated, lifetime-spanning survey of Tait's major works.

Whether painted by artist-warriors depicting their feats in battle or by other Native American artists, 19th and 20th century ledger drawings--drawn on blank sheets of ledger books obtained from U.S. soldiers, traders, missionaries, and reservation employees--provide an excellent visual source of information on the Great Plains Native Americans. An art form representing a transition from drawing on buffalo hide to a paper medium, ledger drawings range in style, content, and quality from primitive and artistically poor to bold and sharp with lavish use of color. Although interest in ledger drawings has increased in the last 20 years, there has never been a guide to holdings of these drawings. By bringing together the diverse and scattered institutions that hold them, this book will make finding the drawings quicker and easier. Illustrated with examples of ledger drawings, the guide identifies the libraries, archives, historical societies, and museums that hold ledger drawings. The institutions listed range from those with large collections, such as the Smithsonian, Yale, and Oklahoma museums, to institutions with only a few drawings. The book also includes a bibliography of books and articles about Indian pictographic art. The index will enable researchers to locate art by individual artists and tribes.

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Sketching and carving both visualize and memorize a given image, but within Nowau culture the manner in which this is achieved in a canoe prowboard is entirely different than in a conventional drawing. When studying the impressive ceremonial canoes of Kitawa, in the Milne Bay Province of Papua New Guinea, G.M.G. Scoditti became struck by the absolute predominance of the artist's mind in the process of creating images: all its stages, its uncertainties and experimentation, must unfold within its silent, rarefied space. Only once fully formed can the image be revealed to the village in material form. Reflecting on the absence of orthographic writing within Nowau culture, and finding parallels with poetic and musical composition, Scoditti gained further insight into the Nowau processes of creation through the critiques the Kitawan carvers made of his own fieldwork sketchbooks. Spurred on by their curiosity, the anthropologist handed over his art materials to the master carvers to make their own drawings on paper or cardboard. Traditional pigments used on the polychrome canoe prowboards were added to the unfamiliar media of watercolour, acrylic, coloured pencils and ballpoint pen. Three-dimensional ornamentation became two-dimensional as images of self-decoration and huts were added to those of prowboards. This exercise was all the more fascinating given the prohibition of drawing on the surface of the wood before carving. On return to Italy, further graphic dialogues unfolded when an architect and an artist from the tradition of Italian Abstraction responded with their own intriguingly different interpretations of the canoe prowboard and its relationship to the Nautilus shell. All these drawings are brought together in this book, along with Scoditti's own sketches from fieldwork and ethnographic collections in Newcastle upon Tyne and Rome. 'The fieldworker's or museum ethnographer's sketches are never going to be quite the same. Through the double filter of Kitawan philosophy and Scoditti's ruminations, the apparently simple triad of sketch - drawing - carving opens out into a discourse on the creative mind. The Kitawan creator - here primarily the male carver - does not have to demonstrate how he creates, and what springs from these pages have a fascination of their own. Several distinctive hands, Kitawan and Italian, reflect from different interpretive and professional vantage points on the very process of drawing through doing exactly that, drawing. The result are images that delight and challenge, sensitively assembled, beautifully reproduced. An extraordinary record of creativity, and a rare corpus of visual memorials.' - Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge

River-cane baskets woven by the Chitimachas of south Louisiana are universally admired for their beauty and workmanship. Recounting friendships that Chitimacha weaver Christine Paul (1874-1946) sustained with two non-Native women at different parts of her life, this book offers a rare vantage point into the lives of American Indians in the segregated South. Mary Bradford (1869-1954) and Caroline Dormon (1888-1971) were not only friends of Christine Paul; they were also patrons who helped connect Paul and other Chitimacha weavers with buyers for their work. Daniel H. Usner uses Paul's letters to Bradford and Dormon to reveal how Indian women, as mediators between their own communities and surrounding outsiders, often drew on accumulated authority and experience in multicultural negotiation to forge new relationships with non-Indian women. Bradford's initial interest in Paul was philanthropic, while Dormon's was anthropological. Both certainly admired the artistry of Chitimacha baskets. For her part, Paul saw in Bradford and Dormon opportunities to promote her basketry tradition and expand a network of outsiders sympathetic to her tribe's vulnerability on many fronts. As Usner explores these friendships, he touches on a range of factors that may have shaped them, including class differences, racial attitudes, and shared ideals of womanhood. The result is an engaging story of American Indian livelihood, identity, and self-determination.

Explore the history and tradition of Wabanaki art.

Plains Indian ledger art grew out of the Native tradition of recording and chronicling through art important exploits by warriors and chiefs, among them images of war and hunting, that would adorn tipis and animal hides. These were seen as historical markers. But Native life on the Great Plains underwent tremendous change following the American Civil War, when the American conquest of the West was in full gear. In just a few decades, access to the hides of diminishing herds of bison, deer, antelope, and elk became more difficult and eventually impossible with reservation life. Native people creatively turned to the easily available ledger books of settlers, traders, and military men as their new canvases. The ledger art drawings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are revered today for their depiction of Native life during the difficult transition to life on the reservation. The ledger drawings thus became a singularly important way for Native artists to preserve tribal history and to serve as a new kind of personal socio-political expression. Dwayne Wilcox, who grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation and is a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation, became interested in ledger art at an early age. He was influenced by the work of Lakota ledger artists such as Amos Bad Heart Bull (1869-1913), but he always sought to defy stereotypical notions of Native life and history and create his own artistic vision. Dwayne eventually focused on humor as his way to comment on the objectification of Native Americans. Skilled as an artist beyond measure, Dwayne's ledger art drawings win major prizes and are sought by museums and collectors who see in him a true artist. Visual/Language is Dwayne's first book, and it was created as a collaborative effort with curator Karen Miller Nearburg, who provides an enlightening introduction to his work. This book will surely penetrate the heart and soul and mind of all who read it.

Winner of the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Winner of the American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation Winner of the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award Winner of the MAAH Stone Book Award A Pitchfork Best Music Book of the Year A Rolling Stone Best Music Book of the Year A Boston Globe Summer Read "Brooks traces all kinds of lines...inviting voices to talk to one another, seeing what different perspectives can offer, opening up new ways of looking and listening." -New York Times "A wide-ranging study of Black female artists, from elders like Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters to Beyonce and Janelle Monae...Connecting the sonic worlds of Black female mythmakers and truth-tellers." -Rolling Stone "A gloriously polyphonic book." -Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland How is it possible that iconic artists like Aretha Franklin and Beyonce can be both at the center and on the fringe of the culture industry? Daphne Brooks explores more than a century of music archives to bring to life the critics, collectors, and listeners who have shaped our perceptions of Black women both on stage and in the recording studio. Liner Notes for the Revolution offers a startling new perspective, informed by the overlooked contributions of other Black women artists. We discover Zora Neale Hurston as a sound archivist and performer, Lorraine Hansberry as a queer feminist critic of modern culture, and Pauline Hopkins as America's first Black female cultural commentator. Brooks tackles the complicated racial politics of blues music recording, song collecting, and rock and roll criticism in this long overdue celebration of Black women musicians as radical intellectuals.

In investigating both customary and modern Pacific art, these collected essays present a wide-ranging view across time and space, taking the reader from antiquities to contemporary art and travelling across the region from Australia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, New Zealand to Samoa. Studies of artefacts and traditions, such as self-portraiture, wood carvings, shields, tapa, dance and masks, use a variety of approaches, some deriving from museum studies while others are based on field investigation. Together they reveal the oppositional tensions between tradition and innovation, and the inspiration this provides for contemporary artistic practice, either through conscious implementation or through rejection of past definitions. Engagement with these cultural performances and objects provide new possibilities for the creation of current identities. The drafting of antiquities legislation, the tortuous journeys objects have taken to find a place in galleries, the use of exhibitions in cultural exchange, framed by the architecture of museums, as well as the role of film and photography in appropriating Pacific art culture for emerging nationalisms, all of these are considered here to enhance our understanding of indigenous art's place in the world today. These historical perspectives provide the framework in which to explore contemporary acquisition and outreach work with Pacific communities that seeks to reconnect people with objects taken away from the places and intentions of their makers. Questions of how identity is maintained and expressed through art are considered for both individuals and groups. What role does the transformations of objects play in this process? What impacts have been made by colonialism, modernism and the great migrations of people between Pacific countries, and from rural to urban environments? Ultimately, how is 'Pacific Islander' defined and by whom? In Repositioning Pacific Art, artists, curators and academics, including Maori and other Islanders, bring fresh approaches to Oceanic Art History and raise questions of relevance not only to scholars of indigenous art in the region but also in other parts of world.

Why did the ancient artists create paintings and engravings? What did the images mean? This careful study of rock art motifs in the Trans-Pecos area of Texas and a small area in South Africa demonstrates that there are archaeological and anthropological ways of accessing the past in order to investigate and explain the significance of rock art motifs. Using two disparate regions shows the possibility of comparative rock art studies and highlights the importance of regional studies and regional variations. This is an ideal resource for students and researchers.

A timely re-examination of European engagements with indigenous art and the presence of indigenous art in the contemporary art world. The arts of Africa, Oceania and native America famously inspired twentieth-century modernist artists such as Picasso, Matisse and Ernst. The politics of such stimulus, however, have long been highly contentious: was this a cross-cultural discovery to be celebrated, or just one more example of Western colonial appropriation? This revelatory book explores cross-cultural art through the lens of settler societies such as Australia and New Zealand, where Europeans made new nations, displacing and outnumbering but never eclipsing native peoples. In this dynamic of dispossession and resistance, visual art has loomed large. Settler artists and designers drew upon Indigenous motifs and styles in their search for distinctive identities. Yet powerful Indigenous art traditions have asserted the presence of First Nations peoples and their claims to place, history and sovereignty. Cultural exchange has been a two-way process, and an unpredictable one: contemporary Indigenous art draws on global contemporary practice, but moves beyond a bland affirmation of hybrid identities to insist on the enduring values and attachment to place of Indigenous peoples.

Why has Asmat art, from a remote and small south-coast West Papuan society, had such a significant and prolonged impact on the world stage? This book explores the way major collections were made and examines the motivations of the collectors, their relationships with those from whom they purchased and the circumstances of the exchange. It also considers the involvement of artists and film-makers, anthropologists, representatives of the civil authorities and missionaries. Asmat artists have maintained their unique appeal through constant stylistic innovation and by engagement with new publics, both locally and internationally, as exemplified by the recent displays of women's weaving alongside the men's carved wooden shields, drums and figures. Despite accelerating social changes, Asmat art continues to thrive as a compelling and transformative Melanesian presence in the global art world. 'Awe-inspiring works of Asmat art loom large in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and in dozens of other great museums around the world. Nick Stanley's engagingly written study provides the best history to date of the making of Asmat art traditions and of their avid acquisition by successive European and north American collectors. Most importantly, the book foregrounds the creativity and imagination of Asmat artists themselves. This is a book that will be welcomed by everyone interested in the arts of the Pacific.' Nicholas Thomas, University of Cambridge

With hundreds of vivid and detailed color photographs and an easy narrative style enlivened by historical vignettes and images, the authors bring overdue appreciation to a centuries-old Native American basketmaking tradition in the Northeast. Explore the full range of vintage Indian woodsplint and sweetgrass basketry in the Northeastern U.S. and Canada, from practical "work" baskets made for domestic use to whimsical "fancy" wares that appealed to Victorian tourists. Basket collectors may compare four regional styles: Southern New England and Long Island, Northern New England and Canadian Maritimes, Upper New York State, and the Great Lakes. Learn of the craft's key role in supporting many Eastern Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples through generations of turmoil and change. Discover how today's creative young artisans are building upon their legacy. The book's "Resources" section guides readers to relevant websites and publications as well as northeastern Indian basketry collections in more than 30 public museums.