CARVING WOOD, MAKING HISTORY: The Fakeye Family, Modernity and Yorůbá Woodcarving
CARVING WOOD, MAKING HISTORY: The Fakeye Family, Modernity and Yorůbá Woodcarving
Author(s): Adérónké Adésolá Adésŕnyŕ
Edited By Adérónké Adésolá Adésŕnyŕ
Purchase: USD $39.95
Type: Book
Language: English
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
Content:: Academic
Source: African World Press
Timeline: The Contemporary Age - From 1789 to 2011
Published: 2019
Description
Carving Wood, Making History: The Fakeye Family, Modernity and Yorůbá Woodcarving is the most comprehensive work on the Yorůbá woodcarving tradition best represented by the works of the Fakeye family of Ělá-Ňrŕngún, northeast Yorůbáland. The research combines an enormous amount of ethnographic data with images to trace the major phases in the history of woodcarving since the nineteenth century. The study highlights the history and contributions of the most successful family of carvers, considers the issues of tradition, modernity, and continuity as well as the import and impact of colonial and postcolonial experiences in the repertoire of Yorůbá carvers. The book presents rich biographical data on individual Yorůbá artists, and utilizes this to foreground areas of confluences and disjuncture between the oeuvres of the artists of the past and those of the new era. The analysis interrogates discourses on a set of conflicting but complementary forces: continuity and change; past and present; tradition and modernity; primordial and civic, all of which locate Yorůbá woodcarving in the entire assemblage of African arts and connect it to bigger questions in art history, African philosophy and history.
"Dr. Adesanya has given us the best book to date on Yorůbá woodcarving. She sets the study within a larger cultural context, blending tradition with modernity, modernization with national renewal, and urbanization with globalization. The wealth of information yields fresh insights and unique orality, complemented with remarkable images, all encompassed within a conceptual framework based on meticulous research, a passion for the subject, and mastery of knowledge on both the Yorůbá and their distinguished carvers."
—Toyin Falola, University Distinguished Teaching Professor and the Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor, University of Texas at Austin
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ADÉRÓNKÉ ADÉSOLÁ ADÉSŔNYŔ is a faculty in the School of Art, Design and Art History, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia. Adésŕnyŕ has a PhD in Art History from the University of Ibadan, and a Postgraduate Diploma in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Uppsala, Sweden. Adésŕnyŕ is the co-editor of Migrations and Creative Expressions in Africa and the African Diasporas, and co-author of Etches of Fresh Waters, a collection of poems. She is at the moment working on her fourth book, Transitions and Transformations in Yorůbá Art.
