African Art and Agency in the Workshop

Contributors

ContrIbutors NICoLAS ARGENTI is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Brunel University, England. He has conducted research in the Cameroon Grassfields on performance and material culture, political hierarchy and social stratification , relations between children, youth and elders, political violence, and memories of the slave trade and colonial domination. ALEXANDER BoRToLoT works in the division of Learning and Innovation at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and received a PhD in Art History from Columbia University in 2008. His research focuses on Makonde masked performance and the intersection of indigenous arts and socialist rhetoric and practice during the socialist era of Mozambican independence. TILL FöRSTER is Chair of Social Anthropology and is founding Director of the Centre for African Studies at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He has specialized in visual culture and political transformations in West and Central Africa, where he also conducted field research in Côte d’Ivoire and Cameroon. He is also the former director of Iwalewa-Haus at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. SILVIA FoRNI is Curator of Anthropology in the Royal ontario Museum and teaches at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her research in the Cameroon Grassfields focuses on the intersection of material culture, gender, and social change. JESSICA GERSCHULTZ is Assistant Professor of African Art and Culture at the University of Kansas. She received her PhD in art history at Emory University in 2012, where she was an American Association of University Women fellow 2011/12. Her research interests include modern tapestry in Tunisia and Senegal, the intersection of gender and state patronage of the arts, relationships among artists in workshop settings, and the sociopolitical dynamics of artists’ networks. SIDNEY LITTLEFIELD KASFIR is Professor Emerita of African Art History at Emory University. She has written on the ritual and performative arts of the Idoma, Nigeria, and warrior theater among the Samburu, Kenya, and is currently working with contemporary artists in Kampala, Uganda. She is author of Contemporary African Art (1999) and African Art and the Colonial Encounter 400 ContrIbutors (IUP, 2007) and editor (with Marla Berns and Richard Fardon) of Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley. NAMUBIRU RoSE KIRUMIRA is a practicing sculptor and lecturer in the Art School at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, where she also earned her BA, MFA, and PhD. She has exhibited widely and participated in residencies and workshops in countries such as Denmark, China, Zambia, and South Africa. KAREN E. MILBoURNE has been Curator at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, since 2008. Her research encompasses a range of issues relating to Lozi arts and pageantry of western Zambia and the spectrum of contemporary African arts, with ongoing projects focused on the intersections of art, land, nation, and industry. ELIZABETH MoRToN is Associate Professor of Art History at Wabash College and Adjunct Curator of African Art at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Her research interests include Christian missions and modern art in southern Africa, the Zimbabwean stone sculpture movement, and South African apartheid resistance art in Botswana. CHIKA oKEKE-AGULU is Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Art in the Department of Art and Archaeology and Center for African American Studies, Princeton University. He is an editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art and co-editor, with okwui Enwezor, of Contemporary African Art Since 1980. CHRISTINE SCHERER holds a PhD in social anthropology and is scientific coordinator of the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies, Germany. She works on the contemporary arts of Africa, in particular in Zimbabwe and southern Africa. BRENDA SCHMAHMANN is Professor in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at the University of Johannesburg. Her primary research focus is on issues of gender, with a specialist focus on community embroidery projects. She has conducted research in southern Africa. NoRMA H. WoLFF is Professor Emerita in the Department of Anthropology, Iowa State University. Her research on continuity and change in art traditions and textiles has focused on the Yoruba and Hausa of Nigeria. ...