From the contents: Christine MATZKE: Comrades in arts and arms: stories of wars and watercolours from Eritrea. - Sabine MARSCHALL: Positioning the other': reception and interpretation of contemporary black South African artists. - Kristine ROOME: The art of liberating voices: contemporary South African art exhibited in New York. - Jonathan ZILBERG: Shona sculpture and documenta 2002: reflections on exclusions.

Once seen as a collection of artifacts and ritual objects, African art now commands respect from museums and collectors. Bennetta Jules-Rosette and J.R. Osborn explore the reframing of African art through case studies of museums and galleries in the United States, Europe, and Africa. The authors take a three-pronged approach. Part One ranges from curiosity cabinets to virtual websites to offer a history of ethnographic and art museums and look at their organization and methods of reaching out to the public. In the second part, the authors examine museums as ecosystems and communities within communities, and they use semiotic methods to analyze images, signs, and symbols drawn from the experiences of curators and artists. The third part introduces innovative strategies for displaying, disseminating, and reclaiming African art. The authors also propose how to reinterpret the art inside and outside the museum and show ways of remixing the results. Drawing on extensive conversations with curators, collectors, and artists, African Art Reframed is an essential guide to building new exchanges and connections in the dynamic worlds of African and global art.

The fight for racial equality in the nineteenth century played out not only in marches and political conventions but also in the print and visual culture created and disseminated throughout the United States by African Americans. Advances in visual technologies--daguerreotypes, lithographs, cartes de visite, and steam printing presses--enabled people to see and participate in social reform movements in new ways. African American activists seized these opportunities and produced images that advanced campaigns for black rights. In this book, Aston Gonzalez charts the changing roles of African American visual artists as they helped build the world they envisioned. Understudied artists such as Robert Douglass Jr., Patrick Henry Reason, James Presley Ball, and Augustus Washington produced images to persuade viewers of the necessity for racial equality, black political leadership, and freedom from slavery. Moreover, these activist artists' networks of transatlantic patronage and travels to Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa reveal their extensive involvement in the most pressing concerns for black people in the Atlantic world. Their work demonstrates how images became central to the ways that people developed ideas about race, citizenship, and politics during the nineteenth century.

The Urhobo peoples occupy the western fringe of the Niger River delta in southern Nigeria, an area rich with oil reserves. Since the 1970s, the petroleum industry has brought worldwide wealth and attention to Nigeria, but tragically has also detracted from broad-based economic progress as flow stations, flare-offs, drilling platforms and pipelines have proliferated. As rural economies suffered an inevitable decline, the custom of maintaining traditional Urhobo art has experienced a parallel atrophy. The resultant decline in Urhobo culture has prompted a response among many Urhobo who want to celebrate and preserve their traditions for future generations. The Museum for African Art in New York makes a major contribution to this effort through the presentation of "Where Gods and Mortals meet," the first exhibition to showcase Urhobo arts. The exhibition introduces never-before-seen Urhobo art and footage of cultural performances, from yesterday and today. This accompanying catalogue includes approximately 80 works of art: traditional art from the historical period 1850 to 1975, including monumental wood figures, metal and clay sculpture, and masks and costumes with accompanying poetry and song; a small selection of contemporary work by Bruce Onobrakpeya, an Urhobo by birth and one of Africa's foremost artists; plus photos and video footage of extraordinary multimedia masquerades.

From the contents: Christine MATZKE: Comrades in arts and arms: stories of wars and watercolours from Eritrea. - Sabine MARSCHALL: Positioning the other': reception and interpretation of contemporary black South African artists. - Kristine ROOME: The art of liberating voices: contemporary South African art exhibited in New York. - Jonathan ZILBERG: Shona sculpture and documenta 2002: reflections on exclusions.

This study focusses on the exhibition of the Tree of Life, a sculpture made in Mozambique of decommissioned, dismantled weapons, created to celebrate peace and commissioned by the British Museum, chosen to be the symbol of the “Africa 2005” season of cultural events and exhibited in its Great Court between February and October 2005. This artwork was first exhibited in Maputo before being dispatched to Britain and it is presently on display at the Sainsbury African Galleries of the British Museum, in London. This dissertation moves along two converging routes: the articulation of the meaning(s) produced within the exhibition and the role of exhibitionary institutions in the creation of social knowledge. A central topic of discussion is the different practices and sites of exhibition of the Tree of Life sculpture in Britain and in Mozambique, in an endeavour to illustrate/establish the differences which determine and/or condition the specific approaches used in the two distinct cultural contexts within which it was exhibited. The discussion evolves towards exploring how a new discourse on the exhibition of contemporary African art questions and challenges both curatorial practices and cultural concepts of collecting, displaying and interpreting art objects and negotiating meaning.