This monograph examines the ongoing career of the internationally recognized Kalabari-British artist, Sokari Douglas Camp, from her earliest documented undergraduate works of the 1980s through more than four decades of prolific sculptural production.  It describes her recursive explorations of subjects engaged in masquerade performance, costumed display, spiritual activity, danced movement, and protesting violence, pollution, and racial injustice.  These diverse themes are consistently informed by her viewpoint as a contemporary, cosmopolitan, African woman. Significant personal and environmental influences are brought out in discussions of the selected works;  more than eighty color figures, many never before published, illustrate the text. Douglas Camp’s name is well-known in the Black British and International arts worlds, but the attention paid her sculpture has swelled and receded episodically: this is the first publication to consider the complexity of her career and suggest reasons for the fluctuations in its reception.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Susan J. Curtis earned a PhD in Art History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2017, after a long hiatus from graduate studies in the 1970s and ‘80s at the University of California-Santa Barbara and the University of Washington. In 2009 introduction to the art of Sokari Douglas   Camp inspired her to resume graduate work in Art History, expressly to publish a volume such as this.

CATEGORY
Art, Biography/AFRICA

PUBLICATION YEAR: 2023

PAGE COUNT: 230

FULL COLOR