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Inscribing Meaning
Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art
Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art" explores the relationships between African art and the communicative powers of language, graphic systems, and the written word. For thousands of years, African artists have incorporated writing and graphic symbols into their art with great ingenuity and creativity. The exhibition and book seek to increase understanding and awareness of Africa's legacies of writing and inscription and their prominent place in artistic and expressive culture past and present.
Scripts communicate in many ways - through their appearance, their placement, and the very act of writing. Objects dating from ancient times to the contemporary moment illustrate how African artists have used both the diverse forms of letters, words, and symbols and their meanings to create beautiful, empowered works of art (Figs. 1-3). The scripts encountered in this exhibition reveal the complexity of African artistic practices through which the visual force and versatility of language, in its broadest sense, are realized. Scripts are used for the beauty, plasticity, and rhythm of their forms, and also as vehicles to assert identity, contest authority, or embody the divine.
"Inscribing Meaning" recognizes Africa's long engagement with written and graphic systems as part of the broader global history of writing and literacy. It draws on a body of literature - art historical, anthropological, and philosophical- that explores the history of writing in world traditions (Drucker 1995, 1998; Martin 1994), the relationships between oral and written communication (Goody 1987, Fabian 1996), and notions of alternative literacies in non-Western societies (Prussin 1986, Boone and Mignolo 1994, Dalby 1995, Battestini 1997, Gundaker 1998). While these studies provide important grounding for definitions of writing and script, they also underscore how non-Western approaches have been marginalized in Western histories of writing. Indeed, it has only been in the past few decades that scholars have begun to address Africa's important place in that history and to consider graphic and mnemonic systems that emphasize alternative forms of knowledge and communication and expand ideas of literacy in Africa and its Diasporas.2
The arts of Africa reveal the continents contributions to the history of writing and inscription systems worldwide. We recognize that a comprehensive review of Africa's writing and graphic systems and their...