Publications
What does a people, made up of more than 1.2 billion souls living on a continent of more than 30 million square kilometres, have to say about itself? Africa is the repository of a collective memory, the receptacle of civilisations with moving boundaries whose gestures have crossed the centuries. What binds the populations of the African continent is the consciousness of living on the same territory, of belonging to the same history, and of facing the same challenges on the African soil: access to education and health; the respect of fundamental human rights; the right to free movement, self-determination and economic emancipation. Over time, this African consciousness has created a sense of belonging – sometimes tenuous – to the same land, the same people and the same destiny. Pan-Africanism, this collective ideal of political, social, economic and cultural emancipation, is the foundation of an unprecedented project.
Contents
Narratives of Womanhood
- Introduction: Is Writing the History of Women’s Art in Africa, Writing the Art that is Coming? Being African, Woman and an Artist Nadine Hounkpatin
- Conflicting Archives: Reimagining and Visualising Sociopolitical Narratives of Women Freedom Fighters in Zambia Gladys Kalichini
- An Aesthetic and Socio-Anthropological Analysis of Three Generations of Cameroonian Woman Artists Ruth Colette Afane Belinga
- Algerian Women Artists: Between History, Appropriation and Deconstruction of an Image Nadira Laggoune
- An Art of Proximity Rachida Triki
Institutional Narratives
- Introduction: Escaping the Vicious Circle Sonia Recasens
- Breaking Boundaries and Borders: Undoing Stereotypes with the Stereotypes (The Case of Contemporary Art from Africa) 3POINTS . . . (Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, Alice Korror Ebeheakey, Bernard Akoi-Jackson
- Modern Women: Archiving African Modernism Perrin Lathrop with Ndidi Dike
- Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu and Miranda Burney-Nicol: Fragments of Trajectories of African Visual Artists Between Paris and London at the Time of Decolonisation Through the Lens of the Magazine Le Musée vivant. Amandine Nana
- One Museum under the Lens: The Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and the Representation of Women Making Art Karen E. Milbourne
Reclaiming the Visual Narratives of Female Modernist Nigerian Artists: Afi Ekong and Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu
Sule Ameh James
Abstract
My paper presents an interpretive approach to the visual analysis of artworks produced by two female modern Nigerian artists, Afi Ekong and Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu. In doing this, I focus on the themes they represented and how such works can be analysed as being African. Although the contributions of these female artists to modern Nigerian art are significant, there is little critical analysis of their artworks in literature, especially when compared to the scholarly attention given to male artists of their era. As a result, their names are not visible in art historical narratives on artists who contributed to the development of modern Nigerian art, except for an exclusive search of their mention. The results show that while a few narratives about them and their works appear, they may be classified as artists whose artistic contributions are at risk of being lost, as such articles do not attempt close case study analysis or contextualise them. It is this gap that my paper seeks to fill by contributing this critical art historical analysis of their works. Through focus on their training, influences, contributions and philosophies, we see how the themes of their artworks may be analysed as African. Given that this paper focuses on a close case study of their artworks, formal analysis and cultural history methodologies are adopted in grounding the analysis. To achieve this, I have selected three artworks by each of these artists for which there is no known critical analysis.
