Celebrating Fifty Years

African Arts is celebrating its half-century milestone! Its first issue was published in autumn of 1967, the brainchild of UCLA faculty Paul O. Proehl and John Povey, who became its first editor-in-chief and managing editor, respectively. We celebrated the 100th issue in October 1992 (vol. 25, no. 4), and did so under the leadership of Doran H. Ross and Donald J. Cosentino, who joined the editorial board in 1988 (Cosentino retired in 2004 and Ross in 2015). Their decision was to look back at the history of African Arts and the field of African art studies through the “personal perspectives of two of the discipline's most celebrated practitioners”: Roy Sieber and Robert Farris Thompson. Ross's comprehensive interview with Sieber and Cosentino's with Thompson provided fascinating recollections by these two pioneering scholars, who ruminated about their lives, their research, and the emergence of the field. Twenty-five years later their words still bear revisiting. In the same issue, the First Word written by executive editor Amy Futa, with tongue partly in cheek, reported on the results of a questionnaire that had been circulated to subscribers about the editorial content of African Arts. Some of the “likes and dislikes” expressed then hold true even today, although one of the strongest critiques of the journal has been recently resolved by the near total absence of advertisements, allowing African Arts to truly assume the identity of a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. The 100th issue also memorialized another UCLA landmark event—the opening of the new Fowler Museum of Cultural History, whose own history aligns closely with that of African Arts, having been founded in 1963. It was only fitting that the issue featured a preview article by Fowler Deputy Director Doran Ross on his inaugural African exhibition in the new building, “Elephant: The Animal and Its Ivory in African Culture.”The next opportunity for a retrospective summation came with the fortieth anniversary of African Arts, when Herbert “Skip” Cole (Cole 2007) offered us a long First Word. His thorough overview of the journal's contributions to the field of African art studies used informal statistical analyses and asked key questions about its trends, accomplishments, shortcomings, and challenges. Cole was chosen for this task as someone who not only had been a consulting editor for over thirty years but was also an “elder” who possessed long and deep knowledge of our discipline.Now that we have reached the fiftieth volume and are approaching the 200th issue, the editors have decided that the journal deserves recognition of equal magnitude. Instead of devoting just one issue to the event as we did for our twenty-fifth we are dedicating all four issues of this volume to various themes and strategies of looking back and looking forward. Just last year, in vol. 49, no. 1, the UCLA team unveiled a new editorial consortium model. In her First Word, Leslie Ellen Jones, executive editor and art director, aptly observed that this shift “marks the beginning of a new era for African Arts” (Jones 2015:1). Whereas editorial responsibility had been vested exclusively in the hands of UCLA Africanists, it is now shared with our colleagues at three other institutions where the study of Africa and of African art flourishes: University of Florida, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Rhodes University of South Africa. The names of the editorial board at each campus will appear on the masthead of every issue. We are particularly proud to welcome our newest Africa-based consortium partner, Rhodes University—or the University Currently Known As Rhodes (UCKAR)—with Ruth Simbao as its initial editor. The inclusion of Rhodes allows us to move closer to the wish expressed by our editors in the very first issue: that an institution in Africa will be “able to take over our task” (Anon. 1967:3). Our goal is not one of asking an African institution to “take over,” but to provide a stronger voice to the issues and debates that occupy our colleagues in Africa. The two First Words in this issue, written by Tobenna Okwuosa of Nigeria and Anitra Nettleton of South Africa, end by calling for the future of the journal as a “platform for many more African voices to be heard” (see Nettleton this issue).Each consortium partner has constructed its issue around a different theme. Vol. 50, no. 2 is Rhodes University's inaugural issue and has been titled Positioning Africa. Simbao defines it as one that will engage with “the geopolitics of knowledge in relation to the arts of Africa”; it “also marks the beginning of an ongoing process of engagements, collaborations, and partnerships that will focus on raising the visibility of Africa-based scholars in the field while grappling with geopolitical analyses of Africa.” It aims to greatly increase the participation of authors on the African continent, a goal all of the editors of African Arts strongly endorse. The Rhodes issue surely will address some of the concerns Nettleton expresses in her First Word here and share with the journal's diverse global readership how Africa-based collaborations will “position scholars on the African continent as critical contributors to the discourse of African art.” The current climate in South Africa, and surely elsewhere on the continent, is part of a larger conversation that also recognizes the aims of the Black Lives Matter movement in the US and foregrounds efforts to decolonize African universities, like Rhodes.The editors at the University of Florida—Susan Cooksey, Rebecca M. Nagy, Fiona McLaughlin, Robin Poynor, and MacKenzie Moon Ryan—have chosen to build their anniversary issue, vol. 50, no. 3, around what they describe as an “idea that inspired so much of African art in the past: ancestors and elders.” The Florida editorial board has asked a number of colleagues who are “elders” to think about the roles played by several key ancestors of our field, whether individuals who have actually gone to the realm of the ancestors or those who have achieved what they consider “living ancestor” status. Five articles will discuss five such eminent leaders who have directly or will indirectly influence future generations of scholars in the field. This issue circles back to Roy Sieber and Robert Farris Thompson as “ancestors,” and it will be interesting to read about these pioneering leaders from the point of view of those who were not elders at the time of the twenty-fifth anniversary issue, when Sieber and Thompson, as elders, spoke about themselves. Monica Visonà has been invited to write a First Word that will address the basic question: How did the scholarship disseminated in African Arts influence the discipline of art history in the United States?For the fourth and final issue of vol. 50, the editors at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill—Lisa Homann, Carol Magee, David G. Pier, and Victoria L. Rovine—have proposed a meditation on the future of African Arts and the future of African art scholarship. Their issue will explore a series of questions:The current issue—the first in the fiftieth anniversary sequence—has been organized by UCLA's editorial board—myself, Patrick A. Polk, Allen F. Roberts, and Mary Nooter Roberts. Our approach is primarily one of “looking back,” doing so by assessing where the journal started when it was launched in 1967 and identifying some of the areas of editorial focus that can be traced to its initial priorities and convictions and that distinguish it today. Two African colleagues write First Words about the impact of African Arts for a continental readership, where access to the journal has been uneven and challenging and a “view of African art/material culture ... was researched and told almost exclusively by white researchers” (Nettleton this issue). As a senior scholar and professor emerita, Anitra Nettleton looks at the historical accessibility of the journal to a readership in South Africa, especially under apartheid, and how its absence and presence has had an impact on the students she has taught. Tobenna Okwuosa is a younger artist and critic based in southern Nigeria whose exposure to African Arts began only as a graduate student in 2002 at the University of Benin, where he saw his first copies in visiting professor Jean Borgatti's office. Okwuosas access to the journal has increased greatly over time (he now has 126 issues on his shelves, many procured as part of a giveaway African Arts offered to Triennial participants in 2011) and he acknowledges the breadth of its content and relevance to his own education. Like Nettleton, he too ends by making a strong plea for a greater inclusivity of African voices.We begin this issue with an English translation of Léopold Sédar Senghor's essay written for the inaugural issue of African Arts in 1967, which also was chosen as its first lead article. Senghors importance as a statesman, poet, and intellectual gave the journal gravitas and also signaled its connectedness to Africa and to the relatively newfound independence and political realities of many of its countries. Why Senghor to launch the journal in 1967? It appears that in that year he made an official visit to Los Angeles for two days as a guest of Mayor Sam Yorty, and it is likely that he visited UCLA and its African Studies Center, which was founded in 1959 and was one of only two in existence west of the Mississippi.1 We can surmise that the editors of the journal invited the distinguished President of Senegal to write a thought-piece on African arts broadly expressed, and he did so in an essay he titled “Standards Critiques de l'Art Africain.” Though pointedly of its time, the current UCLA editors deemed reprinting it now, and in English, as equally timely in the context of our historical reflections on the journal and on our field. Brian Quinn, a recent UCLA PhD in French and Francophone Studies who wrote a dissertation on Senegal, translated the article and provides an insightful introduction.The issue then looks in some depth at three select thematic emphases of the journal's editorial content, especially as each has developed since the first 1967 issue: contemporary arts, photography, and expressive arts. African Arts' original mandate and mission as “a quarterly magazine devoted to the graphic, plastic, performing, and literary arts of Africa, traditional and contemporary” has morphed somewhat over time to “present original research and critical discourse on traditional, contemporary, and popular African arts and expressive cultures.” The expansive original mandate of the journal's founders narrowed after the first decade of publication, with the focus shifting to the “tradition-based” sculptural arts of Africa, especially those south of the Sahara, which were explicated primarily via the original research that dominated the discipline in the 1970s and 1980s. The absolute centrality of African Arts to teaching and as a forum for the dissemination of new research by multidisciplinary scholars in the field became institutionalized during those decades. By the mid-1990s the purview began to widen again, and the journal is now dominated largely by articles on contemporary African art and expressive culture (see Cole 2007).Steven Nelson, in his article “‘Daringly Experimental and Versatile’: African Arts and the Contemporary,” pinpoints 1993 as the turning point in the journal's relationship with contemporary African art with its critical coverage of the exhibition and publication, “Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art” (see vol. 26, no. 1). As a former editor of African Arts and the current Director of the James S. Coleman African Studies Center (the journal's publisher) and Professor of African and African American Art History at UCLA, Nelson has turned his attention to the early years of the journal's history and its editors' preoccupation with framing the contemporary arts of Africa as “daringly experimental and versatile.” Nelson's excavation of their early efforts make fascinating reading and show them to have been progressive advocates of the sophistication and vibrancy of contemporary artistic production and of the important role African Arts played as a platform and outlet for its dissemination in its first volumes. The same can be said to be true of the journal now and into the future.Christraud M. Geary, historian of African photography and the journal's Photo Essay editor, writes an anniversary reflection on African Arts and photography. In it she looks broadly at the genre's essential role over the decades, beginning as a device for documenting and contextualizing African art observed in the field. Indeed, one of the most admired aspects of African Arts has been its publication of mostly high quality color photographs of objects or of their contexts of use (even if its editors and designers have long lamented the skills of many researcher-photographers). Geary's essay also looks at how the journal has kept up with developments in the field as scholars have studied and critiqued archival photography collections, colonial perspectives, the historical work of indigenous African photographers and of the most current contemporary visual artists. As Geary looks to the future, there is little doubt that upcoming issues will continue to focus on “various aspects of African photographies.”Allen F. Roberts, an editor of the journal since 1999 and UCLA Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, writes about the “‘Relations Between Thoughts and Hands’: Expressive Themes of African Arts,” riffing on one of the poetic phrases in Senghor's essay reprinted here and tracing the progressive ways many “arts” have been manifest in the pages of the journal even though some have clearly come and gone. This insightful sweep ranges widely and indicates how so many of the journal's touchpoints over time were prefigured in its first issue. With his deep immersion in the field as a scholar of expressive culture and as a longtime editor of the journal, Roberts picks and chooses key articles and authors in his thematic journey and notes at the end that in so few pages it is difficult to cover everything and everyone deserving mention.From the journal's inception there have been regular feature stories on museum collections. This began in 1967, not surprisingly with a short portfolio on “African Negro Sculpture” from UCLA's Museum and Laboratories of Ethnic Arts and Technology (which would become today's Fowler Museum), written by its then curator and a founding editor of African Arts, Ralph C. Altman. In 1967, the Museum had just received the famed Wellcome Collection from London; it joined the earlier purchase of the Hallet Collection, which launched the Fowler's early collecting of African arts. Exhibition reviews and previews also have been regular fixtures of the journal, starting with Dennis Duerden's “London Letter: Exhibition of Contemporary African Art, 1967” (Duerden 1967). The comprehensive exhibition previews that have emerged allow many of us to “see” exhibitions that occur in places we are unable to visit. These projects have become significant avenues for disseminating scholarship and for creating informative and inspiring contexts to bring objects (many unknown to us from private or unpublished museum collections) in direct juxtaposition with ideas. As Mary Nooter Roberts wrote in a recent First Word for this journal, “A defining aspect of the field of African art history is the degree to which exhibitions have shaped an understanding of the arts of the continent” (Nooter Roberts 2012:4).There are two previews in this issue, both introducing major exhibitions on view this winter at the Fowler Museum at UCLA and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). In keeping with the Fowler's commitment to producing major traveling exhibitions based on intensive scholarship, “African-Print Fashion Now! A Story of Taste, Globalization, and Style” is the first major museum exhibition to focus on fashions from the continent and diaspora that feature African-print cloth. Its curatorial team, led by Suzanne Gott, includes Kristyne Loughran, Leslie W. Rabine, and Betsy D. Quick. The accompanying publication will bring together the scholarship of eighteen contributing authors (including the cocurators and coeditors) and will stand as the definitive text on the subject. As the Preview here the of this exhibition on African in its expansive historical and its focus on both and global as as the work of contemporary who use to about and those who not the exhibition the Preview through all five of the exhibition and a of and art to and its Nooter Roberts, an editor of the journal since 1999 and Professor in UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, us a thorough to her new and in African Arts,” which she has organized as consulting curator of African art at This exhibition a of she has that the of African especially as objects have deep and for their and to to what is from the point of view of the African and as who bring to It also to the of museum to the objects and them in their Roberts has her objects for their and for and the of the feature a of and Their here the point made earlier that the photographs in African Arts are in and of will be much for of the fiftieth volume of African Arts to and over the next doubt the retrospective in these issues will take many of of With the number of articles that have been published in the by only some of will names or articles each of to take a to own contributions to African the published articles and reviews that have both its and of us can the of our research and on the pages of this journal, whether as or scholars, and a UCLA graduate student as an editorial to Amy in the 1970s and saw first on the journal's pages via and exhibition published here first articles the of field a issue on Arts” as as a issue to the UCLA art historian have to every of the journal since in was invited to the consulting editorial board and become the editor have been for the opportunity to work in and to the work of colleagues into a and to share so many field photographs of new and little artistic largely from research in to UCLA as Director of the Fowler Museum in was invited to the editorial is a UCLA but would to that many of can a of to and with African Arts over whether First or or Exhibition and African Arts can be with to our field and its and then it is the of all words and that we as part of our end by our readership on of the team of consortium editors for and future contributions to the and of African Arts, whether are or of the content that the journal. have all played a role in making it a We to those of who have as consulting or editors over the decades, work have as with a vested in the our field. years that the in a who the journal to four a our (Cole We the current team of Leslie Ellen Jones, and Art and and their equally Amy Futa, and was and is a commitment based on and to the production of a high quality forum for research and critical discourse on traditional, contemporary and popular African Arts and expressive and make a to African

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Editorial board · Library science · Media studies · Milestone · Sociology · The arts · Visual arts · Architecture, Art, Education · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Classics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History

• Arts across Africa before 1600

  Jordan A Fenton, Matthew Francis Rarey et al.•African Arts•2026

  Add to list

• Future Thinking

  Lisa Homann, Carol Magee et al.•African Arts•2017

  Add to list

• Letter from London

  Dennis Duerden•African Arts•1967

  Add to list

• Forty Years of African Arts

  Herbert M Cole•African Arts•2007

  Add to list

• Tradition Is Always Now

  Mary Nooter Roberts•African Arts•2012

  Add to list