Description

British Museum Press rep 1995
4to pb 208pp F 870 gms
(Order reference 14457).

The Art of African Textiles, published to accompany a pioneering Barbican Art Gallery exhibition for the Africa 95 season, examines textile design and manufacture across the African continent, with over 150 illustrations displaying the variety and inventiveness of the cloths produced.

Colourful and complex, textiles form an important medium of artistic expression in twentieth-century Africa, yet most literature on the subject has until now dwelt upon the idea of the 'traditional' in African textiles, implying an essentially 'authentic, unchanging, pan-African process, as though the history of African textiles were a single narrative account.

The reality of twentieth-century African textiles is as complex and inter-woven as the textiles themselves. This book reveals the new materials, images, technologies and demands that have enriched textiles in Africa over the last 150 years.