Attending the Triennial always reminds me of the Igbo maxim about masquerades: you certainly can't stand in the same spot and take it all in.

Attending the Triennial always reminds me of the Igbo maxim about masquerades: you certainly can't stand in the same spot and take it all in. The symposium in St Thomas promised to be especially frenzied. Not sole were there five or six panels happening simultaneously in each time slot, but there was the additional draw of Carnival--and the ultimate temptation for someone from chilly Chicago, the warm and zephyr-like water of the Caribbean Sea.

The idyllic setting certainly helped to make this meeting mellower than others, as did the first-rate planning by its organizers. unless equally important was the fact that I did not have to pitch upon between my interests in "traditional" and "contemporary" African art in deciding which panels to attend. to a high degree few were of the token that dominated earlier Triennials, affected with the arts of a single ethnic arrange or a particular ritual adjoining matter and presented in a timeless ethnographic current In St. Thomas far more panels blurr the boundaries between traditional art and contemporary art, demonstrating their interconnectedness and simultaneity. an of the titles alone vividly grant the vision of traditional African art as evolving, creative, and relevant to the world today: "Masks: Transformations, Identities, and Adaptability in Contemporary Society" (chaired according to Laurel Birch Aguilar), "`Power Objects' in the of the present day Millennium" (Elisabeth Cameron), "Transitions and Continuities in Cultural Production/Art from KwaZulu-Natal" (Juliet Armstrong), "Active Arts of Africa and Its Diasporas" (Allen Roberts), and "Wearable Tradition: Africa and the Idea of Africa in Contemporary Fashion" (Victoria Rovine and Kristyne Loughran). These were just a small in number of the panels that demonstrated the continuing vitality of traditional African art.

Herbert M Cole's panel, "Woman and Child in African and Diaspora Art," provided an especially well-balanced example of the boundary-crossing approach in evidence at the conversation The mother and child is an icon of traditional African plastic art that Cole has explored before, however in his introduction he compared these staple images with les familiar contemporary examples, mainly from South Africa, that also set forth mothers with children. This paper helped me diocese some of the best-known images of African art in a just discovered light. While the traditional representations of maternity are often used to support male-dominated institutions, the newer ones--often the work of women artists--express a more female subjectivity. Other presentations onward the panel examined this motif: in ancient support paintings of South Africa (Bert Woodhouse), in fifteenth-century Ethiopian Christian images of the Madonna and child (Michelle Duran-MacLure), and in works by dint of African American women artists (Earnestine Jenkins) and according to South African artist Penny Siopis (Elizabeth Rankin).

Several individual papers for other panels also directly addressed the interface between "traditional" and "contemporary" arts. Till Forster compared "traditional" Senufo funerary carved work with memorial arts in the just discovered media of video, photography, and painting to determine whether the idea of the ancestor changes in meaning as its image changes in form. Silvia Forni analyzed the webwork interplay of art and craft, tradition and modernity, and African and Western aesthetics currented by the Presbyterian Pottery plot in the Cameroon Grasslands. Karen Milbourne discussed a Lozi royal ritual invented during the colonial period and reinvented more lately to reflect the changing political climate. Barbara Frank investigated the issues raised by means of contemporary artists who "mine the canon" of traditional African art by dint of appropriating images. While these are just a not many of the more notable papers drawn from the panels that I attended, many others also demonstrated that Africanist art historians have taken seriously the ne to contemplate at African art in specific historical contexts; up to and including the present

The St Thomas Triennial supported the view held by dint of many in our field that the season "traditional" is outmoded and no longer useful in describing African art as we now understand it. "Traditional" art is not something that was till doomsday static and unchanging. It is not something that was made then, as oppos to "contemporary" art that is being made now. Many of the principally revered images of "traditional" African art were one time newly introduced forms or alterations of previous single in kinds and many of today's innovations will eventually appear conservative, standard, or unruffled old-fashioned. Perhaps it is time we dropp "traditional" from our vocabulary. further what can we use to replace it? Alternatives like as "classical" and "canonical" have many of the same shortcomings as "traditional," and "precolonial" doesn't make over the perpetuation of many art forms from top to toe and long after the colonial period. Similar debates one time circulated around the word "primitive," and as was the case then, I'm certain that the discussion of "traditional" will not solely help us clarify our thinking still lead to new terminology that better muses the current state of the field.