African Art Research Articles

Contemporary art from the Global South in the art auction market from 2020 to 2022

In recent years, emerging artists from the Global South have garnered substantial attention in the art market. This study seeks to examine the market value and ecosystem evolving around these emerging artists by analyzing the sales results of 51 artists between 2020 and 2022. This research aims to establish patterns linking unprecedented sales results with exhibition history and highlights the essential network required for these artists’ commercial success. The study reveals that the emergence of artists in the global art market results from a deliberate effort by a network of stakeholders. Our exhibition database led us to a group of 438 stakeholders who promote this sample of artists. By examining artists’ origins, backgrounds, and careers, this study provides context for analyzing the impact of artistic migration on artists’ visibility, the importance of being promoted by a variety of specialists, and the surge of African artists in the global art market since 2020. Our findings indicate that the structure of the art world has shifted toward a decentralized global art market characterized by a diverse range of actors and inputs dispersed globally. This diversification has disrupted traditional power structures in the art world, opening up new possibilities for emerging artists from the Global South, thereby contributing to a more equitable and inclusive art market.

About Sacred and Religious Art in Africa: An Ethnographic Study on a Private Collection, written by Alexis Bekyane Tengan

About Sacred and Religious Art in Africa: An Ethnographic Study on a Private Collection, written by Alexis Bekyane Tengan

The Life and Art of Mary Parks Washington (Fall 2018)

This essay presents a critical biography of African American visual artist Mary Parks Washington, with an emphasis on her creative development from 1942 to 1979. Washington's extant art is discussed in the context of her educational background, social network, and political affiliations, as well as the history of activist curation in the wake of the Black Arts and Black Power movements. As an undergraduate at Spelman College in the 1940s, Washington was mentored by muralist Hale Woodruff, who encouraged her to continue her studies at the Art Students League of New York, Black Mountain College, and the Universidad Nacional de México. These experiences introduced Washington to key figures of the international and American avant-gardes, including Josef Albers, Diego Rivera, and Jacob Lawrence. In 1958, Washington settled down with her family in the Bay Area, where she met poet Sarah Webster Fabio, a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement on the West Coast. Washington and Fabio's collaborative friendship over two decades culminated in 1979's Offshoots of Roots Unknown, a series of “poem-paintings” that elegize Washington's family in early twentieth century Atlanta and, formally, deal with the technical (and ethical) problem of remembering and representing history. Drawing extensively on archival materials from the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, this essay recognizes Washington's contribution to post-WWII African American art and documents her unique artistic trajectory, traversing aesthetic, social, and political formations from pre-Civil Rights Atlanta to the post-Black Arts Movement Bay Area.

Physical Pain as a Source of Spiritual and Artistic Inspiration in Jackson Hlungwani’s Work

Jackson Hlungwani is a locally recognised South African artist and he is internationally acclaimed with a considerable amount of literature written about his life and work, highlighting his uniqueness distinct rural style (Leibhammer & Nel, 2022) and commercialised value (Lauwrens, 2007: 121-124). He was born around 1923 (according to his grandmother, it was during the time of the Kaiser’s war) (Burnett, 1989: 4). Having acknowledged his contribution to the arts, this paper analyses the man and his work from a different viewpoint, focusing on three aspects of his life namely the human, spiritual and artistic. However, these three aspects should not be considered three independently functioning sides of this man’s existence but three tightly interwoven elements. The research investigates how Hlungwani’s physical pain was embodied in his religious activities and wooden creations and how his suffering, caused by a chronic condition of damaged body tissue, was faced, accepted and assimilated to become a source of spiritual strength supporting his religious ideology and artistic inspiration guiding his remarkable creativity. This study highlights how this South African-born artist dealt with his chronic, somatic condition and turned it from a supernatural condemnation into a source of spiritual strength and creative inspiration. Therefore, through a comparative approach, the study uses relevant published and unpublished biographic material, justified critics and preserved manuscripts in libraries, the media, art museums and exhibitions to unpack the theme of physical pain as a source of spiritual and artistic inspiration in Jackson Hlungwani’s work.

On Migration, Exile, and Cosmopolitanism: A Brief Survey of South African Art Song

One of the genres that comprise the different musics of South Africa is that of the art song. Imported through its European heritage, the art song has found a place in the portfolios of South African composers throughout the twentieth century. However, against the backdrop of its complicated history, South Africa’s art songs often seem to reflect themes of exile, inner struggle and nostalgia. This article contemplates how these themes resonate through South Africa’s complex history, and how they have subsequently been reflected in the genre of art song, with specific reference to songs by composers S. le Roux Marais, Hubert du Plessis, Arnold van Wyk, Peter Klatzow, Hendrik Hofmeyr, and Bongani Ndodana-Breen.

What blind people can teach sighted viewers about art

ABSTRACT While sight and hearing have been privileged in the philosophical formulation of aesthetics, the significance of touch to the experience of art has not enjoyed much attention at all. In order to displace sight and reinstate touch as a viable mode of engagement for the interpretation of visual art, this article reports on a study in which blind individuals and sighted people who were blindfolded were interviewed about their experiences of artworks. The participants were invited to touch selected sculptures in South African artist, Willem Boshoff’s Blind Alphabet (1990 – ongoing) installation. The main aim of the study was to investigate the nature of the tactile aesthetic experience elicited by these sculptures when they are handled and not seen. Secondly, the study aimed to reach a deeper understanding of how tactile engagement with art enriches the experience, meaning and power of the work for both those who can and cannot see. Through the investigation it was revealed that visual art can forge a bridge between individuals with and without blindness.

From Zora Neale to Missionary Mary: Womanist Aesthetics of Faith and Freedom

In this essay, I discuss the art of Missionary Mary Proctor, a contemporary folk artist from Tallahassee, Florida, in the context of the literary aesthetics of the renowned twentieth-century anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston. In comparing these Southern-born African American women artists, I argue that both are rooted in an aesthetic praxis deriving from their shared womanist ethics. My goal in this inquiry is to highlight the faith-based aesthetic traditions of African American women and reveal the manner in which discourses of freedom intertwine with literary and visual aesthetics and faith-based practices in African American folk art and literature. To that end, I analyze the prevalence of themes of liberation within the spiritual discourses of Southern African American women artists such as Missionary Mary Proctor and theorize the manner in which a landscape of Black female liberation is envisioned within their works.

An Intersectional Reading of Senzeni Marasela’s Work: Making Visible the Marginalised Lived Experiences of Black South African Women in States of Perpetual Waiting

This is a study of the way Senzeni Marasela, a South African artist, uses dress to subvert the invisibility of Black South African women, who have previously been marginalised and restricted to the context of the home and domestic work. This article studies several works across Marasela’s career, with a focus on the immersive performance titled Waiting (October 2013 to October 2019) and Theodorah Comes to Johannesburg (2005). The works are read in terms of their presentation on social media and in their art context. In particular, social media posts made during the six-year performance period of Waiting are studied to ascertain how the act of posting content online is used to further make visible Black South African women living through the effects of apartheid. The purpose of this study is to explore how Marasela narrates a lived experience of Black womanhood in ways that are distinctly layered and intersectional in their adoption of discourse and complex in their presentation to the audience.

Mzansi Magic

Mzansi Magic

Laying Waste to History: Recyclia and Urban Art Traditions in Mozambique

ABSTRACT The present article examines the material and cultural foundations of art made with recycled materials in Mozambique, assessing the continuities (and discontinuities) it exhibits with urban art elsewhere. It connects the longstanding practice of recycling street waste into artwork to economic hardship, colonial history, the environmental crisis, and the increasing influence of hip hop and global urban cultural trends. While the scholarly discourse surrounding urban art has tended to focus on the street as an exhibition space and the use of materials such as spray paints that remain unaffordable for many in Africa, this study argues that despite their prevailing recourse to indoor exhibition, many of Mozambique's street ‘recyclists’ harbour similar aims, practices, and concerns to urban artists elsewhere. Considering artwork by a wide range of artists and of varying technologies, media, and overall complexity, the article thus seeks to connect existing scholarship on the use of recyclia in African arts to the much-theorised practices of street art, graffiti and style writing.

The Role of the Church in Iwhuruoha Development

Nigeria like other post-colonial states in Africa greatly suffered and suffocated from the pacification spree of colonialism. It was a most dreadful brutality which distorted and greatly disorganized the cultural bond of the people. All these were systematically orchestrated to achieve an economic objective. In fact, those who set out for colonialist imperialism in Africa and indeed Nigeria, were not engaged in an act of civilization nor the spread of enlightenment spirit. One of the lasting legacies of colonialism in Nigeria is the church. It was the handmaiden of colonialism that softened the mind of the people to embrace the values and ethos of capitalist imperialism. The spread of this consciousness was facilitated by western education. Education became a tool to enter and embrace the world of ‘civilization’. This study seeks to examine the role of the church in Nigeria, particularly in Iwhuruohna. It is a qualitative study and data collection relied solely on secondary sources. These include a review of existing literature, journals, magazines and visit to some research institutes like the Centre for Black and African Arts and Culture in Lagos and Claude Ake School of Government in University of Port Harcourt, Choba. It was discovered that contrary to ex isting position, the church has played significant roles in Nigeria and Iwhuruohna, especially in the production of human capital that have immensely facilitated, the development agenda in Iwhuruohna Ethnicity Nationality (IEN). Rt. Rev. V.A. Ogbonna, Bishop of Ikwerre Diocese of the Christ Army Church is one of such products of the church. We, therefore recommend that men like Bishop Ogbonna whose virtues served as building blocks for the development of their area should be emulated and cherished at all times.

A STUDY OF CULTURAL DIVERSITY BASED ON AFRICAN, AFRO-BRAZILIAN AND INDIGENOUS ARTS IN PRIMARY EDUCATION

The premise of this research is to encourage discussions about the importance of approaching cultural diversity, emphasizing African, Afro-Brazilian and indigenous arts in art classes in the context of basic education, through the construction of reflections that allow the appreciation and recognition of these cultures. as makers of Brazilian cultural identity. This is a bibliographical research, having as its main theoretical body, authors and articles that talk about the subject, as well as legislation that deals with the subject. Based on this research, it is possible to engender reflections about the rich elements that constitute African, Afro-Brazilian and indigenous cultures to disseminate them as belonging to Brazilian culture, as well as the implicit art in these cultures and their relationship with the educational field. With this, the reflection intends to help basic education teachers who feel challenged to significantly approach the theme, with the respect and appreciation that are due to them inside and outside the school.

Using manual methods to produce weaving hangings inspired by African art

Using manual methods to produce weaving hangings inspired by African art

The Cultural Underground of Decolonization

AbstractThe African liberation movements and the early phases of nation-building on the continent, intertwined with the Cold War and the global student movement, left behind an array of textual, visual, and sonic traces that circulated through underground and clandestine networks across Africa and beyond. These cultural products, which include materials in African languages, remain marginalized in studies of African history and arts. This article posits the cultural underground of decolonization in Africa as a productive category for historical and literary inquiry and argues that exploring the literary and aesthetic aspects of this archive offers other ways of knowing and temporal epistemes important for the reconsideration of aesthetics, politics, and histories in and of Africa. I explore poems and songs from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, and Senegal to show how they provide avenues for a renewed engagement with decolonization and revolution.

Conceptions of iconicity and their historical reorientations: Pippa Skotnes's horse skeletons and the topos of the Annunciation

How has art practise historically displayed, enhanced and interrogated its contemporaneous definitions of the nature of images? The focus is on the contemporary South African artist, Pippa Skotnes's horse skeletons, in resonance with a constellation of select Renaissance Annunciation paintings, to highlight the impact of the Eucharist and "real presence" on early modern, modern and post-modern notions of what images have been assumed to be. My comparative interpretation of the diverse works distinguishes their peculiar image functions from systematic and historical perspectives. I show that, with the advent of the most sophisticated type of image, the artistic image, images have been refining their own definitions in performative ways. I show in my interpretations of these image-aware meta-artworks, that the Incarnation of Christ as the Imago Dei, as well as changing historical understandings of Christ's image act of the institution of the Eucharist, gradually and radically transformed understandings of the nature of images in the west. I furthermore argue that Skotnes's knowledge, through performative research of indigenous Southern African image traditions of the Khoisan/|Xam, contributes lost historical image dimensions to her work, and augments current understandings of images and art, at a time when plenary experiences of time, and historical and cultural density, are appreciated. For me, Skotnes's work artistically performs Paul Ricoeur's philosophical assumption that continuous and persistent historical reorientations of ancient sacred symbolism of the natural world remain at the root of, and infinitely augment, contemporary conceptions of the 'figurative' (Ricoeur 1967:10-18) - or by extension, of what images and art are. In the contemporary South African artist's work, the beauty and complexity of diverse simultaneous cultural and geographical notions of what images are and have been, are staged. Like the Renaissance Annunciation paintings, her "bone books" splendidly contribute to the process of differentiating and articulating discursive definitions of what images have been conceived to be.

Generalizing the “Masterpiece Effect” in fine art pricing: Quantile Hedonic regression results for the South African fine art market, 2009–2021

Generalizing the “Masterpiece Effect” in fine art pricing: Quantile Hedonic regression results for the South African fine art market, 2009–2021

Contextual Analysis of the Works of Four selected Contemporary African Artists

Contextual Analysis of the Works of Four selected Contemporary African Artists

Virtualising Africa’s Arts, Securing the Future Engendering Africa’s Popular Songs on TikTok’s Enchanted Space

This paper, locating itself within the locus of Southern Perspectives, examines how TikTok, rehabilitating the local memories imbued in the African popular song genre, re-situates African popular knowledge at the centre of dialogues around the human question. The paper used a lit-crit methodology to show how African female content creators, by creatively archiving and curating Black voices into what was the realm of Northern thought, have used TikTok’s space to dissolve epistemological and ontological boundaries. This paper posits that TikTok is the new canvas for espousing indigenous knowledge within popular literary meditations in Africa and provides a veritable space that has placed contemporary African art forms at the centre of transformative possibilities. The paper concludes that African music on TikTok is an epistemological tool that communicates context and community- specific knowledges.

Touched and Changed: Self-Reflexivity and Reciprocity in Fieldwork

Touched and Changed: Self-Reflexivity and Reciprocity in Fieldwork

African Vernacular Symbols of Black Intersex Children in Sinethemba Ngubane's Installations (2007-2016)

African Vernacular Symbols of Black Intersex Children in Sinethemba Ngubane's Installations (2007-2016)