African Art, Interviews, Narratives Bodies of Knowledge at Work [Paperback]

Joanna Grabski and Carol Magee bring together a compelling collection that shows how interviews can be used to generate new meaning and how connecting with artists and their work can transform artistic production into innovative critical insights and knowledge. The contributors to this volume include artists, museum curators, art historians, and anthropologists, who address artistic production in a variety of locations and media to question previous uses of interview and provoke alternative understandings of art.

In these essays, one hears the narratives and learns the perspectives of a diverse group of people that greatly illuminate both meaning and intent.

Joanna Grabski is Associate Professor and Chair of Art History at Denison University.

Carol Magee is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is author of Africa in the American Imagination: Popular Culture, Racialized Identities, and African Visual Culture.

African Art, Interviews, Narratives . . . is a highly reflective collection of essays about the work of constructing art history out of interviews. Designed to unsettle and open up the relationship between interviews and scholarship, it speaks to the work of anthropology by aiming to better understand the nature of the interview process itself, how we produce and convey meanings from interviews and related documents.? While it will be of particular interest to anthropologists working as museum curators, it will be equally useful to any professional whose craft largely depends upon interviews.African Art, Interviews, Narratives provides scholars the chance to reexamine the role of the interviewer, interlocutor, and art historian when making printed text from recorded interviews.This book enhances our appreciation for interviews as a research tool and cautions us to use this tool with greater awareness of its power to shape our subjects.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Work of Interviewlã