The emerging role of African artists and curators on the international art scene at the beginning of the 21st century repositions African art and raises new possibilities in its local modes of production. This panel considers how the agency of African artists and curators is reconfiguring the study of African art in both its internationally situated and local contexts.
This panel explores current approaches to the study of the visual arts in Africa in the 21st century. As African artists and curators have gained prominence in the international exhibition circuits, this ongoing repositioning of the visual arts of Africa offers new possibilities and constraints for African artists. A question that gains a renewed salience is how contemporary artists situate themselves, and the making of their work, in relation to shifting and multiple paradigms of space and place. Moreover the means by which artists draw upon both localised and more distant cultural resources, ideas and practices highlights the multiplicity of coexisting art worlds within Africa. The ways in which both mobile and locally-based artists actively shape and reconfigure these art worlds through their own practice affords a key purchase for new approaches to the understanding of the visual arts in Africa. This panel offers a critical exploration of these issues by inviting a dialogue of scholars and practitioners who have been influenced by and who celebrate the pedagogy of Emeritus Professor John Picton (SOAS) on African art.
Through workshops, Nigerian art has become migratory and transformational. The notion and practice of immobile studios have begun to shift for the notion of new temporal environment, material and space. The emergence of the Harmattan Workshops as interventionist model is a signal to new energies for reshaping and reordering modern Nigerian art.
Andika picha -- Swahili for write or make a picture -- considers how selected professional artists and a purposive sample of some 1000 Kenyan school children have accomodated western pictorial conventions in their 2-D representations. Research reveals varied syntheses of local, sometimes ethnic, regional and national graphic idioms. Makers tend to draw from a repertoire of imagery, findings which support revision of drawing theory (in psychology and art education).
A look at J. Picton's life and career through his collection of modern African art.
The paper focuses on a local modernity in art in Kumasi, drawing upon the work of more than 100 sign painters and college based artists, active over the past 50 years. By the end of the 20th century, painting, arguably dominated art history in Kumasi, the result of formal education in both apprenticeship and school systems. Interest in Western art (European-American) by painters in Kumasi led to a form of realism that can be called Kumasi Realism. This development was due to the influence of photography, film, advertising arts, illustrations, display, commemorative portraiture and easel painting.
The presentation will examine (a) Discourses of indigenous art criticism as documented in artefacts. (b) Different levels of modern Ghanaian painting merging in a commonality The Kumasi School, and, (c) That the street workshops and college based studios disclose a history of craftsmanship from parallel academies.
Livelihoods the need for economic independence and Government policy are as much motivators and determinants of curricula, as the imagination and innovation of art teachers. There is leeway for experimentation and scope for creativity. Today, University-level painting can be as rigid or flexible, as the teacher. However, the onus for learning of skills is on the student.
Uganda's visual environment from 1960 to the present concerns the dominant ideological movements of the nation's lively and traumatic history. These that are reflected spectacularly in the art genres: expatriate interest in African style in the '50's, pride in Africanisation during the Independence decade; the arts of scarcity characterised the '70's and '80's, while with the stability of the '90's, artists distanced themselves from politics, giving rise to eclectic styles, techniques and ideologies.
This paper will consider a particular performance by Samson Mudzunga , interrogating ways in which he negotiates the space between the traditional and the contemporary, between Venda local politics and the expectations of the High Art world. The paper considers the prohibitions that have been made by Venda traditionalists in shoring up 'ancient', but usurped and Apartheid-backed political powers as the basis for Mudzunga's challenge to and manipulation of urban centres' readings of the contemporary.
This paper concerns young men's masquerades in relation to changing boundaries of the Nigerian state. It will track backwards to a pre-colonial set of linkages between the Niger Benue confluence area and Ekiti Yoruba and then forward to the setting of state boundaries by the ‘contemporary’ Nigerian state. In doing so it follows Picton's continued challenge to the notion of fixed identity, particularly that of a fixed ‘Yoruba’ identity, but also notes how modern state, cultural formations seem to demand a fixed identity either within the Nigerian state or on an international art circuit.
The history of the aloalo, a funerary sculpture from southwest Madagascar, follows the appropriation of a form into many and varied social and political dialogues. How and why has this single visual element been used in Madagascar and beyond to engender such diverse notions as class, ethnicity, nation, imperialism, resistance, craft, art, tradition and modernity?
Benin art history is the study of pre-20th century casting. Fronm the 16th century to the 19th the brass casters of Benin produced exceptional work that, with the conquest of the kingdom in 1897 by a British punitive expedition, presumably came to an end. The downside is that the 20th century was ignored, the casters' art considered banal, imitative, or limitd to gross reproductions, as a result of which art historians did not bother to focus on it. No chronology of 20th century Benin art exists, nor has any attention been given to it. This paper attempts to refocus the study of Benin art by attempting a tentative history of 20th century Benin art and by focusing on contemporary casting styles to show that the casting traditions of Benin are vital, creative, and -- in the case of 20th century art -- attuned to commercial possibilities.
Ebira women's weaving was first documented by John Picton during the 1970s (Picton 1980.) Today the main Ebira town of Okene remains the centre of a dynamic weaving tradition but the cloth woven has been transformed from a primarily local product with long established uses to a prestige fabric worn by fashionable women as far afield as Accra and Dakar. Key to this transformation since the mid 1990s has been the activities of Yoruba women cloth traders based in Lagos.