GALERIE ART PREMIER AFRICAIN GALERIE ART PRIMITIF AFRICAIN AFRICAN ART GALLERY

FOSS Perkins

Where Gods and Mortals Meet: Continuity and Renewal in Urhobo Art

Détails sur le produit: - Relié: 152 pages - Editeur: Snoeck-Ducaji & Zoon; Édition: illustrated edition (10 mai 2004) - Langue: Anglais - ISBN-10: 9053495061 - ISBN-13: 978-9053495063

Book Description: 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. Edited by Perkins Foss.Essays by John Picton, Perkins Foss, Michael Y. Nabofa, G.G. Darah, Tanure Ojaide, and Bruce Onobrakpeya. Foreword by Peter Ekeh. Hardcover, 9 x 12 in. / 152 pgs / 141 color and 7

‘African Vision: The Walt Disney-Tishman African Art Collection’

 

This female figure, made of ivory and standing 37 inches tall, was made in the early Nineteenth Century by Edo peoples in the Benin kingdom court style, and was probably intended for an altar to a queen mother. It is one of the first two objects purchased by Paul and Ruth Tishman in 1959. "Ivory can be almost universally interpreted as a symbol of importance and wealth,” says exhibition curator Bryna Freyer.

WASHINGTON D.C.:Most Americans know little about the vast and diverse continent of Africa, much less the arts created there. Dark and primitive, the arts of the African peoples reflect the rituals of life, stripped to the most basic interpretive forms both conceptually and artistically.

Celebrating the arts of Africa and the profound role that they have played in molding Twentieth Century Abstraction and Modernist art in the "West" is the Smithsonian's newest exhibition, "African Vision: The Walt Disney-Tishman African Art Collection." It is on view through September 7, 2008, at The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African Art (NMAA).

 

"African Vision" showcases 88 outstanding artworks, part of a larger collection donated to the NMAA, that represents the largest gift of sculpture in the museum's history.

 

In 1959, Paul and Ruth Tishman began their collection with the purchase of two pieces of art from the Benin kingdom — an early Nineteenth Century ivory female figure standing 37 inches tall, made in the court style by the Edo peoples, and a 28-inch-tall, Eighteenth Century copper alloy mask that was worn by a divine-healer in masquerade