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: Bold Improvisation: Searching for African-American Quilts - The Heffley Collection

Bold Improvisation: Searching for African-American Quilts - The Heffley Collection

Product Description
This coffee-table art book presents more than 50 bold quilts collected by Scott Heffley dating back 122 years. A tribute to their soulful beauty, the book shows traditional quilts next to their improvisational cousins, as well as African textiles that demonstrate similarities to this American art. Also included are ways to examine quilts, fabric dating, and the importance of recording the history of these quilts. Heffley offers insightful aesthetic observations as well, an outgrowth of his work restoring masterpieces at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.

Awareness Publishing

Small Publishing company with good books for children on African crafts.

Their mission:

About us

Awareness Publishing was established in 2001 to focus on publishing educational books for school children. Our focus is on subjects and life skills that are essential for African children, but which are not being produced by any of the international book publishers due to lack of interest, and which are therefore not available for the African market.

Our philosophy is that children need to read books willingly, without having to be persuaded to do so. We believe that books need to be made in such a way that that children will not be able to resist the temptation of picking them up and reading them. We are also convinced that it is more cost-effective and economic to produce long lasting, durable books (that can be read by many readers in succession), than to economize and produce less attractive books that do not last. Accordingly, all our books are made in hard cover, in full colour, and with a Tough-Cover® long lasting library binding.

Speaking With Beads: Zulu Arts from Southern Africa

Speaking With Beads: Zulu Arts from Southern Africa

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist
Anthropologist Preston-Whyte and photographer Jean Morris combine talents to create one of the first mass-audience books on the beauty and meaning of South African beadwork. Morris, having traveled twice to the eastern seaboard of southern Africa, shows via color photographs how much of the art has changed; whereas Preston-Whyte writes in lay language of the mystical powers, religious ceremonies, and fashion significance of these unique body decorations. Documented here are both new and old styles of bead adornment as well as the accompanying traditions and rites in which they play a part. A nontechnical, elegant glimpse into South African ways and means. Barbara Jacobs