Book: The Woman With the Artistic Brush: A Life History of Yoruba Batik Artist Nike Davies

The Woman With the Artistic Brush: A Life History of Yoruba Batik Artist Nike Davies (Foremother Legacies)

Product Description
Nike Davies is one of the few African women known internationally in contemporary art circles. The Woman with the Artistic Brush traces her life history and illustrates the strategies developed by women to mitigate male rule. Presenting a critique of the woman's place in contemporary Yoruba society from the perspective of a woman who lived it, this book covers Nike's life from the time of her mother's death when Nike was six to the culmination of her dream in the creation, against severe societal odds, of a center for arts and culture that has over 120 members.

Along the way, The Woman with the Artistic Brush details how Nike ran away from home and joined a traveling theater group after her father tried to arrange her marriage, subsequently married and joined in the polygynous household of a noted artist from the popular Osogbo school, and finally broke clear of that situation after suffering sixteen years of domestic violence. The Woman with the Artistic Brush is another superb contribution to the Foremother Legacies series.

Book: African Batik Photo Album

African Batik Photo Album

Product Description
African Batik Photo Album Holds 90 Photos These photo albums use colorful, handmade, Adinkra batik fabrics produced by Asante artisans in Ghana. Due to the manual production process of these fabrics, our fabric designs are not duplicated. When this specific style runs out, we will post a different design on the Amazon.com web site (every few months based on supply so check for new colors/patterns). The symbol on this photo album is Adinkrahene (Chief of the Adinkra Symbols). It is a symbol of Greatness, Charisma & Leadership and is noted to have played an inspiring role in the designing of other symbols. It forms the basis of Adinkra printing.

Book: Accidentally on Purpose: The Aesthetic Management of Irregularities in African Textiles and African-American Quilts

Accidentally on Purpose: The Aesthetic Management of Irregularities in African Textiles and African-American Quilts

Product Description
This exuberantly illustrated book celebrates the sophistication, vivacity, and significance of improvisational African-American quilts, both as artistic achievements and as expressions of African-American traditions. The knowledge, attitudes, and values carried across the Atlantic by enslaved Africans appear to have informed a quilt-making tradition so powerful that, to this day, it preserves its identity in a special province of African-American quilts. Such "Afro-traditional" quilts are made by people who have no formal art training and who usually do not consider themselves artists; they learned their craft and absorbed its aesthetics by watching and helping their mothers, aunts, and grandmothers who, in turn, learned form previous generations. The resulting--often highly idiosyncratic--quilts call out to be seen as the works of art that they are. The brilliance of this work must be partially credited to a tradition which encourages individual expression and provides a context in which the talents of individual artists can flourish.

Improvisation, pervasive in black African art and familiar as a basic element of many African-American musical forms, is a vital force in this tradition. The artists maintain a generous attitude toward the accidental, embracing innovations that originate beyond the conscious domain. they use approximate measurement and "flexible patterning," in which the design, conceived of as a an invitation to variation, will not repeat, but will materialize in a sequence of visual elaborations.

Afro-traditional attitudes and methods are antithetical to the standard American quiltmaking tradition--practiced by both whites and blacks--in which great value is placed on precise measurement and exact pattern replication. Instead they bear a keen likeness to the improvisatory practices of the textile-makers of Kongo and West Africa, regions from which American slaves were taken. These antipathies and affinities suggest an enduring African influence on the Afro-traditional quilt.

Book: Signs and Symbols: African Images in African American Quilts

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Signs and Symbols: African Images in African American Quilts (2nd Edition)

African-American quilts possess two unique qualities: more than any other American visual art, they most fully realize the expressive force of jazz, and they bind together generations of African-American families who have made and cherished quilts. In Signs and Symbols, quilt expert Maude Southwell Wahlman introduces readers to a third powerful force in these quilts: their African-derived meanings, patterns, and iconography. She explores the religious, ritual, philosophical, and aesthetic beliefs that have been retained by descendants of Africans in the New World and demonstrates how these beliefs are represented in their textiles. Now back in print, Signs and Symbols remains the most complete illustrated work on this art form; featuring over 150 high-quality full-color reproductions.

Nike Centre for Art and Culture, Nigeria

Artist and Designer Nike Davies Okundaye invites you to visit her Nigeria, an ancient culture that thrives in modern cities, a world that moves easily between talking drums and the internet.

Nike has given workshops on traditional Nigerian textiles to audiences in the US and Europe during the past 20 years. While she is known for her colorful batik and paintings that offers a modernist gloss on traditional themes, she was brought up amidst the traditional weaving and dying practiced in her native village of Ogidi in Western Nigeria. Her fame as an artist and teacher has taken her all over the globe. Now, she invites you to visit her in Nigeria and immerse yourself in African tradition.

Nike found that the traditional methods of weaving and dying that had been her original inspiration were fading in Nigeria. She used her international success to launch a cultural revival, building art centers where young Nigerians master traditional arts and crafts. You can now visit the world of the Yoruba, to explore a culture that has flourished in Western Nigeria for well over 1000 years.

Whether you are a specialist in the arts, an enthusiast of African arts or merely interested in a brief immersion in a new culture, Nike offers the opportunity to see Nigeria with fresh eyes. You stay at guest houses at her homes in Lagos, Oshogbo and Ogidi. You travel through Nigeria in air conditioned cars and buses with your guides and teachers. You spend your days visiting museums, galleries, and traditional markets, or studying the techniques used by Yoruba craftsmen and artists. You join her family and her apprentices at mealtimes to sample Nigerian specialties.

Nike Art Centers
Textile artists, painters, sculptors, dancers and drummers... Learn more about Nike's five Art Centers in Lagos, Oshogbo, Ogidi and Abuja, where Nigerian artists and craftsmen ply their trades and where you can study among them.

Tours
Visiting our art centers and Nigeria, from the moment you arrive until you walk into the departure lounge you are our guest. Learn more about our tours, accommodations, and travel tips for Nigeria.

Arts
Adire, batik, indigo, beadwork, painting, carving, embroidery, metalwork, weaving and drumming. Our students are engaged in a variety of both traditional and contemporary arts. Visit this page also for information on purchasing our artworks.