The unique character of Ethiopian art is the legacy of its situation high in the mountains, on the Horn of Africa. Though remote and often isolated it evolved a tradition in response to contacts with Byzantine, European, and Islamic cultures. Beginning in the twelfth century, elaborate crosses were cast and engraved in iron and bronze. Painted and carved icons were produced in a tradition that reached its peak at the end of the seventeenth century. Above all it is richly illustrated manuscripts which have provided the most defining expression of Ethiopian Christianity.

If modernism initially came to Africa through colonial contact, what does Ethiopia’s inimitable historical condition—its independence save for five years under Italian occupation—mean for its own modernist tradition? In Modernist Art in Ethiopia—the first book-length study of the topic—Elizabeth W. Giorgis recognizes that her home country’s supposed singularity, particularly as it pertains to its history from 1900 to the present, cannot be conceived outside the broader colonial legacy. She uses the evolution of modernist art in Ethiopia to open up the intellectual, cultural, and political histories of it in a pan-African context. Giorgis explores the varied precedents of the country’s political and intellectual history to understand the ways in which the import and range of visual narratives were mediated across different moments, and to reveal the conditions that account for the extraordinary dynamism of the visual arts in Ethiopia. In locating its arguments at the intersection of visual culture and literary and performance studies, Modernist Art in Ethiopia details how innovations in visual art intersected with shifts in philosophical and ideological narratives of modernity. The result is profoundly innovative work—a bold intellectual, cultural, and political history of Ethiopia, with art as its centerpiece.

Exhibition catalog, Paper not available, Published for Museum for African Art, New York.

Ethiopia has often attracted attention because of its unique position as an ancient Christian culture far into Africa. Many people have been fascinated by the brilliant colours and childlike directness of traditional Ethiopian art. Little attention has been given, however, to the great art periods the culture has witnessed in the past. The fifteenth century saw a magnificent flowering of painting in the highlands of central and northern Ethiopia - in paintings on panel and above all in manuscripts. This book features an unparallelled collection of Ethiopian Christian artefacts, mostly fifteenth-century manuscripts and icons and metalwork but also some work from the two succeeding centuries.

Ethiopia: Traditions of Creativity presents the work of fifteen contemporary Ethiopian artists and essays on Ethiopia's artistic traditions by twelve scholars from various countries and academic disciplines.

In the rural plateaux of northern Ethiopia, one can still find scattered ruins of monumental buildings that are evidently alien to the country's ancient architectural tradition. This little-known and rarely studied architectural heritage is a silent witness to a fascinating if equivocal cultural encounter that took place in the 16th-17th centuries between Catholic Europeans and Orthodox Ethiopians. The Indigenous and the Foreign in Christian Ethiopian Art presents a selection of papers derived from the 5th Conference on the History of Ethiopian Art, which for the first time systematically approached this heritage. Bringing together work by key researchers in the field, these studies open up a particularly rich period in the history of Ethiopia and cast new light on the complexities of cultural and religious (mis)encounters between Africa and Europe.