Product Description: In this book, Suzanne Preston Blier examines the intersection of art, risk, and creativity in early African arts from the Yoruba center of Ife and the striking ways that ancient Ife artworks inform society, politics, history, and religion...read more

Product Description: Images of Congo brings to light New York artist Anne Eisner who lived in the former Belgian Congo during the 1940s and 1950s. Her passion for maverick field anthropologist Patrick Putnam brought her to the place he founded Camp Putnam at the edge of the Ituri forest...read more

Product Description: In West and Central Africa in the centuries just before and after European contact, powerful kingdoms flourished, each with its own distinct art practices. The royal arts of Benin, Yoruba, Dahomey, Asante, Kongo, Kuba, and others are the subject of this book...read more

In West and Central Africa in the centuries just before and after European contact, powerful kingdoms flourished, each with its own distinct art practices. The royal arts of Benin, Yoruba, Dahomey, Asante, Kongo, Kuba, and others are the subject of this book. What are the court-art traditions of the African royal states? How do art and architecture define individual, dynastic, royal, and national identity? What is the impact on them of centuries of trade, colonization, and religious exchange? How is this art to be understood within its cultural context? Blier draws on a vast range of individual objects - crowns and masks, thrones and regalia, palace architecture, painting, textiles, body decoration, and jewelry - as well as archival photographs of art works in use in ceremonies and performances. Using detailed descriptions she offers a subtle cultural reading of these complex arts. Blier's thoughtful and expert examination goes beyond particular visual analysis to explore vital questions of royalty and power, divine kingship, state cosmology, the place of women at court, and the use of art in dynastic history, diplomacy, and war. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Beads, bones, rags, straw, leather, pottery, fur, feathers and blood--these are the raw materials of vodun artworks. The power of these images lies not only in their aesthetic, and counter-aesthetic, appeal but also in their psychological and emotional effect...read more

Blier illuminates the extraordinary architecture of the Batammaliba people of Western Africa, revealing these buildings as texts through which we can read the beliefs, psychology, traditions, and social concerns of their inhabitants. In doing so, she explores the role of vernacular architecture as an expression of culture.