Celebrating Fifty Years

African Arts is celebrating its half-century milestone! Its first issue was published in autumn of 1967, the brainchild of UCLA faculty Paul O. Proehl and John Povey, who became its first editor-in-chief and managing editor, respectively. We celebrated the 100th issue in October 1992 (vol. 25, no. 4), and did so under the leadership of Doran H. Ross and Donald J. Cosentino, who joined the editorial board in 1988 (Cosentino retired in 2004 and Ross in 2015). Their decision was to look back at the history of African Arts and the field of African art studies through the “personal perspectives of two of the discipline’s most celebrated practitioners”: Roy Sieber and Robert Farris Thompson. Ross’s comprehensive interview with Sieber and Cosentino’s with Thompson provided fascinating recollections by these two pioneering scholars, who ruminated about their lives, their research, and the emergence of the field. Twenty-five years later their words still bear revisiting. In the same issue, the First Word written by executive editor Amy Futa, with tongue partly in cheek, reported on the results of a questionnaire that had been circulated to subscribers about the editorial content of African Arts. Some of the “likes and dislikes” expressed then hold true even today, although one of the strongest critiques of the journal has been recently resolved by the near total absence of advertisements, allowing African Arts to truly assume the identity of a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. The 100th issue also memorialized another UCLA landmark event—the opening of the new Fowler Museum of Cultural History, whose own history aligns closely with that of African Arts, having been founded in 1963. It was only fitting that the issue featured a preview article by Fowler Deputy Director Doran Ross on his inaugural African exhibition in the new building, “Elephant: The Animal and Its Ivory in African Culture.”

The next opportunity for a retrospective summation came with the fortieth anniversary of African Arts, when Herbert “Skip” Cole (Cole 2007) offered us a long First Word. His thorough overview of the journal’s contributions to the field of African art studies used informal statistical analyses and asked key questions about its trends, accomplishments, shortcomings, and challenges. Cole was chosen for this task as someone who not only had been a consulting editor for over thirty years but was also an “elder” who possessed long and deep knowledge of our discipline.

Now that we have reached the fiftieth volume and are approaching the 200th issue, the editors have decided that the journal deserves recognition of equal magnitude. Instead of devoting just one issue to the event as we did for our twenty-fifth we are dedicating all four issues of this volume to various themes and strategies of looking back and looking forward. Just last year, in vol. 49, no. 1, the UCLA team unveiled a new editorial consortium model. In her First Word, Leslie Ellen Jones, executive editor and art director, aptly observed that this shift “marks the beginning of a new era for African Arts” (Jones 2015:1). Whereas editorial responsibility had been vested exclusively in the hands of UCLA Africanists, it is now shared with our colleagues at three other institutions where the study of Africa and of African art flourishes: University of Florida, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Rhodes University of South Africa. The names of the editorial board at each campus will appear on the masthead of every issue. We are particularly proud to welcome our newest Africa-based consortium partner, Rhodes University—or the University Currently Known As Rhodes (UCKAR)—with Ruth Simbao as its initial editor. The inclusion of Rhodes allows us to move closer to the wish expressed by our editors in the very first issue: that an institution in Africa will be “able to take over our task” (Anon. 1967:3). Our goal is not one of asking an African institution to “take over,” but to provide a stronger voice to the issues and debates that occupy our colleagues in Africa. The two First Words in this issue, written by Tobenna Okwuosa of Nigeria and Anitra Nettleton of South...