A Companion to Modern African Art

Offering a wealth of perspectives on African modern and Modernist art from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, this new Companion features essays by African, European, and North American authors who assess the work of individual artists as well as exploring broader themes such as discoveries of new technologies and globalization.

• A pioneering continent-based assessment of modern art and modernity across Africa
• Includes original and previously unpublished fieldwork-based material
• Features new and complex theoretical arguments about the nature of modernity and Modernism
• Addresses a widely acknowledged gap in the literature on African Art

Monica Blackmun Visonà is Associate Professor in the School of Art and Visual Studies of the University of Kentucky, USA, where she teaches courses on African art and architecture, and art historical methods. The principle author of A History of Art in Africa (2000, 2008), she has also published Constructing African Art Histories for the Lagoons of Côte d’Ivoire (2010), and contributed articles to Art Bulletin and African Arts. She is currently researching the artists of the western Akan peoples for a museum exhibition.

Gitti Salami is Associate Professor of World Art History at Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, USA. In a decade of extensive field research in south-eastern Nigeria she has published numerous articles on Yakurr culture in African Arts and Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture. She has been awarded a Fulbright-Hays DDRA fellowship and a grant from the West African Research Association (WARA), and has held resident fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution and the University of East Anglia, UK. A forthcoming monograph examines contemporary Yakurr art genres from a postcolonial theoretical standpoint.

List of Figures

Notes on Contributors

PART I: INTRODUCTION

1. Writing African Modernism into Art History
Gitti Salami and Monica Blackmun Visonà

PART II: “AFRICA HAS ALWAYS BEEN MODERN”

2. Local Transformations, Global Inspirations: The Visual Histories and Cultures of Mami Wata Arts in Africa
Henry John Drewal

PART III: ART IN COSMOPOLITAN AFRICA: THE NINETEENTH CENTURY  

3. Loango Coast Ivories and the Legacies of Afro-Portuguese Arts
Nichole N. Bridges

4. Roots and Routes of African Photographic Practices: From Modern to Vernacular Photography in West and Central Africa
Christraud M. Geary

5. At Home in the World: Portrait Photography and Swahili Mercantile Aesthetics
Prita Meier

6. African Reimaginations: Presence, Absence and New Way Architecture
Ikem Stanley Okoye

PART IV: MODERNITIES AND CROSS-CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS IN ARTS OF THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

7. “One of the Best Tools for Learning”: Rethinking the Role of ‘Abduh’s Fatwa in Egyptian Art History
Dina A. Ramadan

8. Congolese and Belgian Appropriations of the Colonial Era: The Commissioned Work of Tshelantende (Djilatendo) and its Reception
Kathrin Langenohl

9. Warriors in Top Hats: Images of Modernity and Military Power on West African Coasts
Monica Blackmun Visonà

PART V: COLONIALISM, MODERNISM, AND ART IN INDEPENDENT NATIONS

10. Algerian Painters and Pioneers of Modernism
Mary Vogl

11. Kofi Antubam, 1922-1964: A Modern Ghanaian Artist, Educator and Writer
Atta Kwami

12. Patron and Artist in the Shaping of Zimbabwean Art
Elizabeth Morton

13. “Being Modern”: Identity Debates and Makerere’s Art School in the 1960s
Sunanda K. Sanyal

14. The École des Arts and Exhibitionary Platforms in Post Independence Senegal
Joanne Grabski

15. From Iconoclasm to Heritage: the Osogbo Art Movement and the Dynamics of Modernism in Nigeria Peter Probst

16. Modernity and Modernism in African Art
John Picton

17. A Century of Painting in the Congo: Image, Memory, Experience and Knowledge
Bogumil Jewsiewicki

PART VI: PERSPECTIVES ON ARTS OF THE AFRICAN DIASPORA

18. Visual Expressivity in the Art of the Black Diaspora: Conjunctures and Disjunctures
dele jegede

PART VII: SYNTHESES IN ART OF THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY

19. Art and Social Dynamics in Côte d’Ivoire: the Position of  Vohou-Vohou
Yacouba Konate

20. Contemporary Contradictions: Bronzecasting in the Edo Kingdom of Benin
Barbara Winston Blackmun

21. Puppets as Witnesses and Perpetrators in “Ubu and the Truth Commission
Peter Ukpokodu

22. Moroccan Art Museums and Memories of Modernity
Katarzyna Pieprzak

PART VIII: PRIMITIVISM AS ERASURE

23. The Enduring Power of Primitivism: Showcasing the Other in Twenty-First Century France
Sally Price

PART IX:  LOCAL EXPRESSION AND GLOBAL MODERNITY AFRICAN ART OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 

24. Zwelethu Mthethwa’s ‘Post-Documentary’ Portraiture: Views From South Africa and Abroad
Pamela Allara

25. Creative Diffusion: African Intersections in the Biennale Network
Kinsey Katchka

26. Lacuna: Uganda in a Globalizing Field
Sidney Littlefield Kasfir

27. Painted Visions under Rebel Domination: A Cultural Center and Political Imagination in Northern Côte d’Ivoire
Till Förster

28. Post-Independence Architecture through North Korean Modes: Namibian Commissions of the Mansudae Overseas Project
Meghan L. E. Kirkwood

29. Concrete Aspirations: Modern Art at the Roundabout in Ugep, Cross River State, Nigeria
Gitti Salami

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