The Pen-Pictures of Modern Africans and African Celebrities by Charles Francis Hutchison

The Pen-Pictures of Modern Africans and African Celebrities by Charles Francis Hutchison
Author: Doortmont
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 517
Release: 2022-01-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 9047406346

The Pen-Pictures is a well-known source for the history of the Gold Coast, modern Ghana, cited and quoted by both professional historians and interested lay-people. This annotated edition is the first reprint of the book and offers a lively and both historically and literarily interesting text about an important phase in Ghanaian history. The added introduction and annotation offer a context hitherto unavailable to the scholar and general reader.

The Artist Portrait Series

The Artist Portrait Series
Author:
Publisher: SIU Press
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2001
Genre: African American artists
ISBN:

Fern Logan s collection of photographic portraits documents the emergence of the African American artist into mainstream American art. "The Artist Portrait Series" captures sixty significant artists from the late twentieth century. Each rich duotone portrait is accompanied by Logan s commentary on the artist.Logan began her career as a nature, landscape, and architectural photographer, but in 1983, resolving to put the human figure into her repertoire, she created the photodocumentary Artist Portrait Series. Her philosophy of art as an educational tool prompted her to document the accomplishments of such highly skilled visual artists as Gordon Parks, Elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence, Roy DeCarava, and Romare Bearden. Logan expanded the project to promote recognition for prominent black artists in theater, television, film, music, dance, and literature, including Alvin Ailey, Maya Angelou, and Adolph Caesar. Her subjects include well-known artists as well as those who were emerging at the time they were photographed.For Logan, the artistic process is as important as the final image. Her portraits not only capture the personality of the sitter but also convey the dialogue and rapport between photographer and subject. Logan s interest in the tonal range of the black-and-white photograph and its contribution to the rich drama between light and dark informs her photographs in a formal manner. By allowing the artist/sitter to construct the photographic moment, Logan creates visually dynamic and psychologically probing images that are reinforced by the immediate studio or living environment. This elegant book documents nearly two decades of her finest portraits."

Ethnographic Collecting and African Agency in Early Colonial West Africa

Ethnographic Collecting and African Agency in Early Colonial West Africa
Author: Zachary Kingdon
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2019-02-21
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1501337939

The early collections from Africa in Liverpool's World Museum reflect the city's longstanding shipping and commercial links with Africa's Atlantic coast. A principal component of these collections is an assemblage of several thousand artefacts from western Africa that were transported to institutions in northwest England between 1894 and 1916 by the Liverpool steam ship engineer Arnold Ridyard. While Ridyard's collecting efforts can be seen to have been shaped by the steamers' dynamic capacity to connect widely separated people and places, his Methodist credentials were fundamental in determining the profile of his African networks, because they meant that he was not part of official colonial authority in West Africa. Kingdon's study uncovers the identities of many of Ridyard's numerous West African collaborators and discusses their interests and predicaments under the colonial dispensation. Against this background account, their agendas are examined with reference to surviving narratives that accompanied their donations and within the context of broader processes of trans-imperial exchange, through which they forged new identities and statuses for themselves and attempted to counter expressions of British cultural imperialism in the region. The study concludes with a discussion of the competing meanings assigned to the Ridyard assemblage by the Liverpool Museum and examines the ways in which its re-contextualization in museum contexts helped to efface signs of the energies and narratives behind its creation.

Oxford Street, Accra

Oxford Street, Accra
Author: Ato Quayson
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 477
Release: 2014-09-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822376296

In Oxford Street, Accra, Ato Quayson analyzes the dynamics of Ghana's capital city through a focus on Oxford Street, part of Accra's most vibrant and globalized commercial district. He traces the city's evolution from its settlement in the mid-seventeenth century to the present day. He combines his impressions of the sights, sounds, interactions, and distribution of space with broader dynamics, including the histories of colonial and postcolonial town planning and the marks of transnationalism evident in Accra's salsa scene, gym culture, and commercial billboards. Quayson finds that the various planning systems that have shaped the city—and had their stratifying effects intensified by the IMF-mandated structural adjustment programs of the late 1980s—prepared the way for the early-1990s transformation of a largely residential neighborhood into a kinetic shopping district. With an intense commercialism overlying, or coexisting with, stark economic inequalities, Oxford Street is a microcosm of historical and urban processes that have made Accra the variegated and contradictory metropolis that it is today.

African Print Cultures

African Print Cultures
Author: Derek Peterson
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 461
Release: 2016-09-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0472122134

The essays collected in African Print Cultures claim African newspapers as subjects of historical and literary study. Newspapers were not only vehicles for anticolonial nationalism. They were also incubators of literary experimentation and networks by which new solidarities came into being. By focusing on the creative work that African editors and contributors did, this volume brings an infrastructure of African public culture into view. The first of four thematic sections, “African Newspaper Networks,” considers the work that newspaper editors did to relate events within their locality to happenings in far-off places. This work of correlation and juxtaposition made it possible for distant people to see themselves as fellow travellers. “Experiments with Genre” explores how newspapers nurtured the development of new literary genres, such as poetry, realist fiction, photoplays, and travel writing in African languages and in English. “Newspapers and Their Publics” looks at the ways in which African newspapers fostered the creation of new kinds of communities and served as networks for public interaction, political and otherwise. The final section, “Afterlives, ” is about the longue durée of history that newspapers helped to structure, and how, throughout the twentieth century, print allowed contributors to view their writing as material meant for posterity.

The African Lookbook

The African Lookbook
Author: Catherine E. McKinley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2021-02-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1620403544

Winner of the African Photobook of the Year Award A Choice Outstanding Title of the Year A USA Today "Must-Read for Black History Month" An NPR "Goats and Soda" Editors' Pick A BookRiot Favorite Nonfiction Book of the Year An unprecedented visual history of African women told in striking and subversive historical photographs-featuring an Introduction by Edwidge Danticat and a Foreword by Jacqueline Woodson. Most of us grew up with images of African women that were purely anthropological-bright displays of exotica where the deeper personhood seemed tucked away. Or they were chronicles of war and poverty-“poverty porn.” But now, curator Catherine E. McKinley draws on her extensive collection of historical and contemporary photos to present a visual history spanning a hundred-year arc (1870–1970) of what is among the earliest photography on the continent. These images tell a different story of African women: how deeply cosmopolitan and modern they are in their style; how they were able to reclaim the tools of the colonial oppression that threatened their selfhood and livelihoods. Featuring works by celebrated African masters, African studios of local legend, and anonymous artists, The African Lookbook captures the dignity, playfulness, austerity, grandeur, and fantasy-making of African women across centuries. McKinley also features photos by Europeans-most starkly, striking nudes-revealing the relationships between white men and the Black female sitters where, at best, a grave power imbalance lies. It's a bittersweet truth that when there is exploitation there can also be profound resistance expressed in unexpected ways-even if it's only in gazing back. These photos tell the story of how the sewing machine and the camera became powerful tools for women's self-expression, revealing a truly glorious display of everyday beauty.

In/sight

In/sight
Author: Clare Bell
Publisher: Abrams
Total Pages: 290
Release: 1996
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Presenting the work of 30 diverse photographers from throughout Africa since 1940, this is the complete catalogue of an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Mapping Modernisms

Mapping Modernisms
Author: Elizabeth Harney
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2018-11-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0822372614

Mapping Modernisms brings together scholars working around the world to address the modern arts produced by indigenous and colonized artists. Expanding the contours of modernity and its visual products, the contributors illustrate how these artists engaged with ideas of Primitivism through visual forms and philosophical ideas. Although often overlooked in the literature on global modernisms, artists, artworks, and art patrons moved within and across national and imperial borders, carrying, appropriating, or translating objects, images, and ideas. These itineraries made up the dense networks of modern life, contributing to the crafting of modern subjectivities and of local, transnationally inflected modernisms. Addressing the silence on indigeneity in established narratives of modernism, the contributors decenter art history's traditional Western orientation and prompt a re-evaluation of canonical understandings of twentieth-century art history. Mapping Modernisms is the first book in Modernist Exchanges, a multivolume project dedicated to rewriting the history of modernism and modernist art to include artists, theorists, art forms, and movements from around the world. Contributors. Bill Anthes, Peter Brunt, Karen Duffek, Erin Haney, Elizabeth Harney, Heather Igloliorte, Sandra Klopper, Ian McLean, Anitra Nettleton, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Ruth B. Phillips, W. Jackson Rushing III, Damian Skinner, Nicholas Thomas, Norman Vorano