Art and Art Education in Africa, edited by Elsbeth Court and Rachel Mason, documents an extraordinary symposium of 130 visual art specialists from twenty countries, mostly scholar-practitioners, who debated about art, African art and art education in Africa at the peak of the africa’95 season in London. The collected texts indicate a variety of conditions which, in turn, generate contingent ways of becoming and being a contemporary artist. These comparative configurations of artistic production and practice move the discourse beyond the rhetoric – and, indeed, prejudice – that persists in obscuring the actualities and accomplishments of ‘African art’. The beam of continuity in the book is the sharing of both visionary and practical approaches to education in and through art. Some thirty texts include (i) historical and institutional backgrounds for specialised art education, (ii) case studies of specific situations: some that involve the processes of decolonisation and re-engagement with traditions and others that set out regional and trans-Africa initiatives and (iii) artist’s statements in prose and performance about their careers and concerns. The majority of the texts are edited versions of the original papers, most of which have been up-dated, revised and, or supplemented (as indicated by the year). There are six newly written texts plus the Introduction and a Foreword.

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