World is Africa brings together more than 30 important texts by Eddie Chambers, who for several decades has been an original and a critical voice within the field of African diaspora art history. The texts range from book chapters and catalogue essays, to shorter texts. Chambers focuses on contemporary artists and their practices, from a range of international locations, who for the most part are identified with the African diaspora. None of the texts are available online and none have been available outside of the original publication in which they first appeared. The volume contains several new pieces of writing, including a consideration of the art world 'fetishization' of the 1980s, as the manifestation of a reluctance to accept the majority of Black British artists as valid individual practitioners, choosing instead to shackle them to exhibitions that took place three decades ago. Another new text re-examines the 'map paintings' of Frank Bowling, the Guyana-born artist who was the subject of a major retrospective at Tate Britain in 2019. The third introduces the little-known record sleeve illustrations of Charles White, the American artist who was the subject of a major retrospective in 2018 at major galleries across the US. Among the other new texts is a critical reflection on the patronage the Greater London Council extended to Black artists in 1980s London. World is Africa makes a valuable contribution to the emerging discipline of black British art history, the field of African diaspora studies and African diaspora art history.

Winner, 2021 Melva J. Dwyer AwardItee Pootoogook belonged to a new generation of Inuit artists who are transforming and reshaping the creative traditions that were successfully pioneered by their parents and grandparents in the second half of the 20th century.A meticulous draughtsman who worked with graphite and coloured pencil, Itee depicted buildings in Kinngait that incorporated a perspectival view, a relatively recent practice influenced by his training as a carpenter and his interest in photography. His portraits of acquaintances and family members similarly bear witness to the contemporary North. Whether he depicts them at work or resting, his subjects are engaged in a range of activities from preparing carcasses brought in from hunting to playing music or contemplating the landscape of the North.Itee was also an inventive landscapist. Many of his finest Arctic scenes emphasize the open horizon that separates land from sky and the ever-shifting colours of the Arctic. Rendering the variable light of the landscape with precision, he brought a level of attention that contributed, over time, to his style.Featuring more than 100 images and essays by curators, art historians, and contemporary artists, Itee Pootoogook: Hymns to Silence celebrates the creative spirit of an innovative artist. It is the first publication devoted exclusively to his art.

In the sixteenth-century Atlantic world, nature and culture swirled in people's minds to produce fantastic images. In the South of France, a cloister's painted wooden panels greeted parishioners with vivid depictions of unicorns, dragons, and centaurs, while Mayans in the Yucatan created openings to buildings that resembled a fierce animal's jaws, known to archaeologists as serpent-column portals. In Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic, historian Peter C. Mancall reveals how Europeans and Native Americans thought about a natural world undergoing rapid change in the century following the historic voyages of Christopher Columbus. Through innovative use of oral history and folklore maintained for centuries by Native Americans, as well as original use of spectacular manuscript atlases, paintings that depict on-the-spot European representations of nature, and texts that circulated imperfectly across the ocean, he reveals how the encounter between the old world and the new changed the fate of millions of individuals. This inspired work of Atlantic, European, and American history begins with medieval concepts of nature and ends in an age when the printed book became the primary avenue for the dissemination of scientific information. Throughout the sixteenth century, the borders between the natural world and the supernatural were more porous than modern readers might realize. Native Americans and Europeans alike thought about monsters, spirits, and insects in considerable depth. In Mancall's vivid narrative, the modern world emerged as a result of the myriad encounters between peoples who inhabited the Atlantic basin in this period. The centuries that followed can be comprehended only by exploring how culture in its many forms-stories, paintings, books-shaped human understanding of the natural world.

Headrests are simple, utilitarian objects. Widely used across Africa, they are predominantly found in the eastern, central, and southern part of the continent. Also known as neckrests or pillows, headrests are valuable and very personal objects which are indispensable to everyday life. They are made to sleep on, to rest the neck, to sit on, and to protect the elaborate coiffure of their owners. At first sight, they appear to be devoid of any symbolic content. This functional utility has confined them through history to the realm of mere objects. Headrests are not that simple, though. They transcend their material purpose to become something more. In many instances, their design, inherent beauty, technical mastery, and uses give them a multi-purpose value and a multi-layered meaning. They are objects with ritual and magical intent concealed inside their utilitarian function. Headrests can be flaunted as status symbols that differentiate chiefs from ordinary people, rich from poor, diviners from healers, farmers from shepherds, and sedentary from nomadic. The volume features full-colour pictures of very rare and fine headrests that have never before been published. Short texts introduce selected pieces among the 230 works that have particularly interesting, well-documented backgrounds. This book is a journey through ethnicity, anthropology, aesthetics, creativity, tradition, and spirituality. A journey to a part of Africa that materialises through a simple artefact that sometimes dreams to become art: a dream that starts with resting the neck on a piece of wood.

Presented here are one hundred classic-era (1880s-1940s) Hopi and Zuni carved dolls from private and public collections that have rarely, if ever, been put on exhibition and that collectively form a profound and powerful assembly of the very finest examples from the classic period in Kachina carving. Andrea Portago has gracefully photographed these rare figures using available light so as not to distort their colours and to reveal their movement and drama, passion and personality.

While blood quantum laws have been used to determine an individual's inclusion in a Native group, Eiteljorg fellowship artists have instead come to view themselves as belonging to the "Art Tribe," through the universal process of art creation and collaboration. Art Quantum presents a selection of the extraordinary work created by the five artists selected for the 2009 Eiteljorg Fellowship. In his essay on the long career of Edward Poitras (Gordon First Nation), Alfred Young Man (Cree) places Poitras's installations in the context of Metis and Indian identity as well as the White art establishment in Canada. Gail Tremblay (Onondaga / Micmac) illuminates the work of Jim Denomie (Ojibwa), reading his narrative paintings and intimately scaled portraits through their complex and humorous references to history, art history, and current events. Jimmie Durham (Cherokee) uses the analogy of music to explore the language of abstraction in sculptural and two-dimensional works by Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Band of Choctaw / Cherokee), while the subtle and often monochromatic sculptural installations of Faye HeavyShield (Kainai-Blood) are sensitively interpreted by Lee-Ann Martin (Mohawk). The volume closes with Polly Nordstrand's (Hopi / Norwegian) reflection on the themes of longing/not belonging and placement/displacement that Wendy Red Star (Crow) documents in her photographs and appliqued dance shawls. It is the goal of the Eiteljorg Fellowship to be a starting point and a platform for exploration of Native identity and artistic expression beyond the concepts of blood quantum laws. Essays by James Nottage, Jennifer Complo McNutt, Ashley Holland (Cherokee), and Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche) help to situate the larger issue of Native identity in the contemporary art world.

Asen, metal sculptures of southern Benin, West Africa, are created to honor the dead and are meant to encourage interaction between visible and spiritual worlds in ancestral rites associated with the belief system known as vodun. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the former Kingdom of Dahomey, Bay traces more than 150 years of transformations in the manufacture and symbolic meanings of asen against the backdrop of a slave-raiding monarchy, domination by French colonialism, and postcolonial political and social change. Bay expertly reads evidence of the area's turbulent history through analysis of asen motifs as she describes the diverse influences affecting the process of asen production from the point of their probable invention to their current decline in use. Paradoxically, asen represent a sacred African art form, yet are created using European materials and technologies and are embellished with figures drawn from tourist production. Bay's meticulously researched artistic and historical study is a fascinating exploration of creativity and change within Benin's culture.

Thirty years ago, Australian Aboriginal art was little more than a footnote to world art. Today, it is considered to be an important contemporary art movement, often promoted as being connected to a deep cultural past. Becoming Art provides a new analysis of the shifting cultural and social contexts that surround the production of Aboriginal art. Transcending the boundaries between anthropology and art history, the book draws on arguments from both disciplines to provide a unique interdisciplinary perspective that places the artists themselves at the centre of the argument. Western art history has traditionally regarded Aboriginal art as distanced from time and place. Becoming Art uses the recent history of Aboriginal art to challenge some of the presuppositions of western art discourse and western art worlds. It argues for a more cross-cultural perspective on world art history.

This comprehensive work takes a broad view of what rock art entails, covering the history of rock art research and the discovery of many new sites. The author illustrates the different symbols and motifs that are found throughout the British Isles, and shows where they occur in landscapes and monuments. It is a book that captures the excitement of discovery and examines the various theories about the origin, use and meaning of rock art. Stan Beckensall also explains the problems of accurate conservation, recording, and display.

The years between 1922 and 1961, often referred to as the "Dark Ages of Northwest Coast art," have largely been ignored by art historians, and dismissed as a period of artistic decline. Tales of Ghosts compellingly reclaims this era, arguing that it was instead a critical period during which the art played an important role in public discourses on the status of First Nations people in Canadian society. Those with an interest in First Nations and Canadian history and art history, anthropology, museology, and post-colonial studies will be delighted by the publication of this major contribution to their fields.

Between 1890 and 1918, British colonial expansion in Africa led to the removal of many African artifacts that were subsequently brought to Britain and displayed. Annie Coombes argues that this activity had profound repercussions for the construction of a national identity within Britain itself-the effects of which are still with us today. Through a series of detailed case studies, Coombes analyzes the popular and scientific knowledge of Africa which shaped a diverse public's perception of that continent: the looting and display of the Benin "bronzes" from Nigeria; ethnographic museums; the mass spectacle of large-scale international and missionary exhibitions and colonial exhibitions such as the "Stanley and African" of 1890; together with the critical reaction to such events in British national newspapers, the radical and humanitarian press and the West African press. Coombes argues that although endlessly reiterated racial stereotypes were disseminated through popular images of all things "African," this was no simple reproduction of imperial ideology. There were a number of different and sometimes conflicting representations of Africa and of what it was to be African-representations that varied according to political, institutional, and disciplinary pressures. The professionalization of anthropology over this period played a crucial role in the popularization of contradictory ideas about African culture to a mass public. Pioneering in its research, this book offers valuable insights for art and design historians, historians of imperialism and anthropology, anthropologists, and museologists.

This description is for the French edition. Le Nunatsiavut, region inuite du Canada qui possede une administration autonome depuis 2005, a une production artistique a part dans le monde de l'art canadien et de l'art inuit circumpolaire. Population inuite la plus meridionale au monde, le peuple cotier du Nunatsiavut a toujours vecu a cheval sur la limite forestiere, et les artistes et artisans inuits du Nunatsiavut ont eu acces a une flore et une faune arctique et subarctique tres diversifiees, a partir desquelles ils ont cree des uvres d'une surprenante variete. Les artistes du territoire se sont traditionnellement servis de la pierre et du bois pour sculpter, de la fourrure, du cuir et de la peau de phoque pour l'art mobilier et des graminees marines pour la vannerie, ainsi que de la laine, du metal, du tissu, des perles et du papier. Plus recemment, ils ont travaille avec des techniques que l'on retrouve en art contemporain, comme la peinture, le dessin, la gravure, la photographie, la video et la ceramique, sans pour autant delaisser les materiaux traditionnels, utilises de maniere novatrice et inusitee. SakKijajuk. Art et artisanat du Nunatsiavut est la premiere publication d'importance sur l'art des Inuits du Labrador. Ecrit pour accompagner une exposition itinerante majeure concue par The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery Division de St. John's, l'ouvrage comprend plus de 80 reproductions d'uvres de 45 artistes, une presentation de ces derniers et un essai de fond sur l'art au Nunatsiavut signe par la commissaire Heather Igloliorte. SakKijajuk "etre visible" - prendre sa place-dans le dialecte inuktitut du Nunatsiavut) constitue une occasion unique pour les lecteurs, collectionneurs, historiens de l'art et amateurs d'art du Sud comme du Nord de creer une relation particuliere avec le travail different, novateur et toujours saisissant des artistes et artisans inuits contemporains du Nunatsiavut.

& Western approaches to Africa's visual culture have until recently separated 'traditional' from 'modern' as if the two categories had no common ground, and as if only the former was authentically African. Yet 'tradition' is also an active process of handing on, one subject to evolution, development and history. This book explores a burgeoning body of West African artistic production that draws upon photography, advertising, graphic design, European art history and Ghanaian history and culture. As such it constitutes an envisioning of a local modernity centred upon Kumasi, a vibrant trading city at the centre of local, national and international networks, whether historical, economic, political, educational, religious or aesthetic. The art described here, whatever its immediate purpose, reflects and interprets this intense and unique local context. Among the Ghanaian painters discussed are E.V. Asihene, Grace Kwami, E.K.J. Tetteh, Ablade Glover, Ato Delaquis, B. Offei Nyako, Atta Kwami, kari'kacha seid'ou, Bob Acheampong and many others whose practice was college based. Kwami also discusses the art and lives of Kumasi's leading sign painters - King Samino (King Samino Sign Art Services), Alex Amofa (Supreme Art Works), Kwame Akoto (Almighty God Art Works), Isaac Azey Otchere (Azey Alberto Art Sign Service), and Isumaila Moro (Iss Hi-Tech Prints) - thereby exploring the interrelationship of two entwined traditions, two art worlds of modern painting centred at either the university and/or the signpainter's workshop.

The Royal Chicano Air Force produced major works of visual art, poetry, prose, music, and performance during the second half of the twentieth century and first decades of the twenty-first. Materializing in Sacramento, California, in 1969 and established between 1970 and 1972, the RCAF helped redefine the meaning of artistic production and artwork to include community engagement projects such as breakfast programs, community art classes, and political and labor activism. The collective's work has contributed significantly both to Chicano/a civil rights activism and to Chicano/a art history, literature, and culture. Blending RCAF members' biographies and accounts of their artistic production with art historical, cultural, and literary scholarship, Flying under the Radar with the Royal Chicano Air Force is the first in-depth study of this vanguard Chicano/a arts collective and activist group. Ella Maria Diaz investigates how the RCAF questioned and countered conventions of Western art, from the canon taught in US institutions to Mexican national art history, while advancing a Chicano/a historical consciousness in the cultural borderlands. In particular, she demonstrates how women significantly contributed to the collective's output, navigating and challenging the overarching patriarchal cultural norms of the Chicano Movement and their manifestations in the RCAF. Diaz also shows how the RCAF's verbal and visual architecture-a literal and figurative construction of Chicano/a signs, symbols, and texts-established the groundwork for numerous theoretical interventions made by key scholars in the 1990s and the twenty-first century.

This interdisciplinary collection of essays, by both Natives and non-Natives, explores presentations and representations of indigenous bodies in historical and contemporary contexts. Recent decades have seen a wealth of scholarship on the body in a wide range of disciplines. "Indigenous Bodies" extends this scholarship in exciting new ways, bringing together the disciplinary expertise of Native studies scholars from around the world. The book is particularly concerned with the Native body as a site of persistent fascination, colonial oppression, and indigenous agency, along with the endurance of these legacies within Native communities. At the core of this collection lies a dual commitment to exposing numerous and diverse disempowerments of indigenous peoples, and to recognizing the many ways in which these same people retained and/or reclaimed agency. Issues of reviewing, relocating, and reclaiming bodies are examined in the chapters, which are paired to bring to light juxtapositions and connections and further the transnational development of indigenous studies.