Book Project Announcement and Donor Request African Art and Aesthetics at the Matrix of Yoruba Art and Language: Rowland Abiodun and Interlocutors

I am working on a book that will provide a synoptic vision of the achievement of Rowland Abiodun, philosopher of Yoruba art and literature and their interrelationship, in relation to the verbal/visual dynamic in African arts and cultures.

I anticipate a presentation of all his published works, with the place of each of these works in his oeuvre explained, as well as a presentation of the responses to his work.

I hope to present all his works in their entirety as well as the writings of his interlocutors.

I intend to present these materials as an open access website and  a free access e book.

Print publication could follow later.

Why is this project important and why at this time?

Rowland Abiodun published Yoruba Art and Language  : Seeking the African in African Art, in 2014. An integration of his life's work, reprinting often revised versions of his seminal articles spanning decades, foundational for their subject,  unified by an introduction.

That book enables readers place his work in perspective within its own internal configurations  and in relation to the ideational, methodological and institutional development of the study of African and global art histories.

In achieving this goal Yoruba Art and Language  also facilitates a sensitivity to the various ways in  which Abiodun's work may be framed.

Abiodun's axial paper, 'The Future of African Art Studies: An African Perspective', is not in  Yoruba Art and Language. That essay is Abiodun's first, programmatic presentation,  known to me,  of his vision as a scholar of Yoruba art within the context of research imperatives in African art studies.

The essay distills the philosophical significance and practical implications for scholarship, of his trajectory up to that point, an orientation centred in understanding Yoruba art through  perspectives drawn from Yoruba oral literature, exploring the art through the perspectives of its creators and immediate audience, an approach he described in the essay as critical for adequate appreciation of the manner in which this art belongs within an engagement with reality represented by art as a fashioning of experience and aspiration in terms of visual form.

That paper underlies the thesis of  Yoruba Art and Language and is Abiodun's only presentation known to me among his essays,  of an overview of concepts at the intersection of metaphysics, ethics and visual expression in nature and art that constitutes his understanding of Yoruba aesthetics, a perspective in alignment with and possibly catalytic of developments in the field, even as his own work is nourished by such pioneers as William Fagg and Ulli Beier.

A text that highlights such cognitive architectures of Abiodun's creativity and providing the essays demonstrating these developments would be vital in understanding Abiodun's contributions to the understanding and practice of Yoruba art and aesthetics and the significance of that achievement for the study of African and global arts and aesthetics.

Also vital would be better visual projection of the art being discussed by Abiodun than has been available before now within his works.

The advent of the Internet has led to an explosion in the quality and volume of images of African art available and  publications of Abiodun's works need to reflect these developments. 

My intention, therefore, is to reproduce his  essays, using  the same images the essays have used and adding others, so that the reader/viewer may more readily engage with the art that inspires his work. 

Using a website and ebook will eliminate issues of publication cost, particularly for colour images.

The website and the ebook would be free, access enabled by  by donations from  interested parties.

I am asking for donations to cover my expenses during the project and in recognition of the fact that I shall be getting no royalties from it as authors normally do after their works are published. 

The economic factor is particularly strategic in relation to scholarship on African art because the books on the subject are often expensive texts published in the West and therefore difficult for Africans to purchase on account of huge currency differentials and even challenging for purchase even in the West on account of cost while, I, for one, gained a good general grounding in Western art as a child in Nigeria by reading children's books on the subject, within the the Ladybird series of superbly illustrated small hardback l books.

My library on  art was also significantly boosted by my shopping in bookshops in England, a situation in which I observed the proliferation of cheap and excellent books on Western art with a much smaller range of affordability of African art books.

I shall be discussing this project with Rowland Abiodun and the copyright holders of his essays,  with Cambridge University Press, the publishers of Yoruba Art and Language and with the holders of the copyrights to the essays on his work. 

I am giving myself a maximum of one year to complete the project. 

You may donate at the following blog link Rowland Abiodun, Philosopher of Yoruba Art

You may read my essay on Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language : Seeking the African in African Art