PASALA - Project for the Advanced Study of Art and Life in Africa and The University of Iowa

Preface

Christopher D. Roy, PhD

The Graduate Student Symposia on African Art at The University of Iowa have been sponsored by funding provided by Max and Betty Stanley, of Muscatine Iowa. The Stanleys are best known in the African art world for their very generous gift of their large and excellent collection of African an to the University of Iowa Museum of An from 1985 to 1991. Since the late 1970's the Stanleys have supported all of the African art programs at Iowa, as well as a wide range of research and teaching projects, student research abroad, and international conferences in the Center for International and Comparative Studies, and in several departments in the College of Liberal Arts. Support provided by the Stanleys has funded the Project for Advanced Study of Art and Life in Africa (PASALA) since 1990, which sponsors the Stanley Conferences, and provides scholarships for graduate study and research in Africa, as well as for faculty travel and research projects.

The first conference on African art was held at Iowa in the spring of 1979 in conjunction with the opening of the first public exhibition of the Stanley Collection. There have been six conferences over the years, whose proceedings have been published in the journal Iowa Studies in African Art. In 1991 two graduate students, Julie Risser, who now teaches in Minneapolis, and Dana Rush, who has recently completed her dissertation on the arts of Vodun in Benin, asked if they could have Stanley support to organize a graduate student conference to be held on the same weekend as the Stanley Conference, and which would provide a forum for graduate students who had recently completed field research for their dissertations to present their material to an audience of senior scholars and of their own peers. Because the Stanley Conferences were held on Friday and Saturday, most of the senior scholars planned to stay in Iowa City Saturday night to save on airfare, and so would be available to attend the graduates' papers the next day. At the same time, many graduate students wished to attend the Stanley Conferences, and the opportunity to present their own work gave them additional reason to travel to Iowa City, and provided an audience that was able to comment constructively on their work. The intention was also to give graduate students experience in presenting papers in public.

There have been five graduate Student Conferences on African Art at Iowa since 1991, and although it is impossible to mention every paper here, I will mention those that have led to ongoing research and recent publication. The first conference, organized by Julie Risser and Dana Rush, included papers on the Salampasu by Elisabeth Cameron, on Ejagham art by Christa Clarke, on contemporary art in South Africa by John Peffer and Gary van Wyck. Laurel Faulkner, now Laurel de Aguilar, presented her research on Chewa masks. The second symposium was held in conjunction with the Triennial Symposium on African Art at Iowa, and'featured papers by Elias Bongmba, Rachel Hoffman, on Dogon women's art, Philip De Boeck on arts of healing among the Lunda and Chokwe, Alisa La Gamma on the arts of Gabon, Janet Hess on African-American quilts. Victoria Rovine, who is now the curator of African art at Iowa, presented her work on Bamana bogolanfini. The third conference was organized by Brenda Molife and Lynn Waller in 1993, and eight papers, including those on women's masquerades in Burkina Faso by Emily Hanna-Vergara, Igbo masks by Bess Reed, and on tourist baskets in Kenya by Beverly Harding.

These papers represent the newest and freshest research in and about African art and visual culture. They are an extraordinarily important resource, and an indicator of the directions research in Africa will take in the next decade. They cover a great variety of topics, including contemporary art, traditional art, tourist art, the commodification of art, art in a political context, and art to prevent AIDS. They are documents of the ways Africans are creating new forms of art to deal with new issues, to overcome new problems, and to express new and innovative ideas. They are the best evidence I can discover of how wrong-headed it would be to think that we should abandon the effort to do new field research, to give up the effort to discover new data about old traditions of use and meaning, or to examine and enjoy the new forms that are constantly being created in Africa. Some years ago a senior scholar of African art, feeling insecure, I imagine about the directions other art history areas were taking and feeling that studies of African art were being left behind, suggested that we stop doing field research in Africa and focus on analyzing the data we have already gathered. The richness of the information presented in this volume, and in past conferences at Iowa, make it very clear to me that such changes would have disastrous consequences, and would impoverish the field.