East African objects - Tanzania and Mozambique |
Rand African Art home page Sukuma Culture and Tanzania by Mark H.C. Bessire A few good books on Tanzanian art and culture |
From Ritual to Modern Art - Tradition and Modernity in Tanzanian Sculpture Edited by Manfred Ewel and Anne Outwater "This beautifully produced and lavishly illustrated book addresses the huge imbalance in appreciation and representation of African art. Museums, exhibitions, lavish catalogues, magazines, and publications on African art are largely dominated by non-African scholars and institutions. These imbalances lie in the economic and political discrepancies, the history of European colonialism in Africa, and the Western tradition of scholarship and public education on art, history and ethnography. Outside Africa, East African art has been assumed to be more or less non-existent. This is one of the few publications to have come out of Tanzania, bearing witness to the appreciation of sculptural art and its tradition in that country. The book arose out of a symposium on The Significance of Traditional Cultures for Today's Society which brought together Tanzanian and other experts organised by the National Museums of Tanzania and the German Cultural Centre in Dar es Salaam. Papers from that symposium, together with additional articles on the history and current state of sculpture in Tanzania, present art from an African perspective, and include contributions from Western scholars joining forces with African scholars. Sociological, ethnological and art historical approaches are included, illustrating sculpture as the prime example of fine art in Africa, both in its purely aesthetic sense and intricately linked with its ever changing cultural context." Available from the Michigan State University online bookstore and also Amazon.com and also the book (if you can find it) Mwana hiti: Life and art of the matrilineal Bantu of Tanzania by Marc Leo Felix "Book Description: 1990. Edition limited to 1,000 copies, Munich, 1990. The first treatise on the mwana hiti, the wooden, highly stylized torso of a female figure, this important volume accompanied a major 1990 exhibition of mwana hiti and other objects of Tanzanian art at the Fred Jahn Gallery in Munich. Impressively thorough with almost 500 excellent photographs and containing important essays and research data on stylistic differences, typology, and the ethnography of Zaramo and Kwere peoples of eastern Tanzania, this study is another impressive work by an author whose writings are a boone to collector and scholar alike. The edition was limited to 1000 copies and is out of print 505 pages, text in English and German, 481 photographs, 8 drawings, 3 figures, 12 maps." When I did this page there was a copy available at Tribalartbooks.com or by searching Abe Books I found a few copies. |