Introduction: art, risk, and creativity; Part I. Art, Risk, and Identity: 1. Art making: artists, subjects, technologies, and media; 2. Experiencing art: sight, site, and perspectives of viewing; 3. If looks could kill: aesthetics and political expression; 4. Embedding identity: marking the Ife body; Part II. Politics, Representation, and Regalia: 5. A gallery of portrait heads: political art; 6. Animal avatars: art, identity, and the natural world; 7. Crowning glory: the art and politics of headgear; 8. Battling with symbols: scepters, staffs, and seats; Conclusions.
This book examines the intersection of art, risk and creativity in early African arts from the Yoruba center of Ife.
Suzanne Preston Blier is Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, Massachusetts. Her first book, The Anatomy of Architecture: Ontology and Metaphor in Batammaliba Architectural Expression (Cambridge, 1987) won the Arnold Rubin prize. Her second book, African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power (1995), won the Charles Rufus Morey Prize. Other books include African Royal Art: The Majesty of Form (1998), Butabu: Adobe Architecture in West Africa (2003) and Art of the Senses: Masterpieces from the William and Bertha Teel Collection (2004). She was a member of the Collège de France International Scientific and Strategic Committee (2011–13) and is on the board of the College Art Association. Her past fellowships include CASVA (Paul Mellon Senior Fellow, the National Gallery of Art), John Simon Guggenheim, the Radcliffe Institute, National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), Fulbright Senior Research, Social Science Research Council, American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the Getty Center for the Study of Art.
'First encountered by foreign observers a century ago, the arts of
ancient Ife have since astonished and baffled scholars and
connoisseurs alike. Blier's research, Shakespearean in scope, at
last connects these sublime sculptures to a tumultuous past and a
vital present.' Donald J. Cosentino, University of California, Los
Angeles
'Blier deploys an understated rhetoric in this well-researched,
historically grounded, thought-provoking analysis of Ife art,
reverberating far beyond the field of African art history. … her
fresh arguments are … precisely what had to be achieved by new
critical scholarship on such a well-established corpus.' Ikem
Stanley Okoye, University of Delaware
'As much a history of ancient Yoruba art as an investigation into
the ways in which the creation, exhibition, and preservation
of art are seriously risky ventures, Suzanne Preston Blier's
magisterial new book brings medieval African art alive and reminds
us that art and its meanings have been and will remain a
subject of heated contention. This is the definitive analysis
of the arts and civilization in the long and splendid history
of the Yoruba culture.' Henry Louis Gates, Jr, Harvard
University, Massachusetts
'In the beginning of each of the chapters that are grouped under
two parts, Blier's deep understanding of the subject, particularly
as displayed in some of the Yoruba proverbs as well as similitudes
from revered western artists and thinkers, is not in doubt.'
Tajudeen Sowole, Nigerian Guardian
'… a text that will quickly become the foundational work on Ife art
and a model for art history as a multidisciplinary enterprise.'
Eric Gable, African Studies Review
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