This book examines the Yoruba Avant Garde artists of the modern era. It
highlights an important, but underrepresented and under-acknowledged cadre of
artistic personalities in the Yoruba cultural traditions known as, Are. Are, are
trailblazers, and cultural innovators, like their French counterparts, the Avant
Garde, who must set, of necessity, a new artistic agenda for others to emulate. Our
goal is to situate these artists within the dialectics of modernism and postmodernist
currents and how, their artistic impulses intersect with colonial and postcolonial
discourses in modern Yoruba society.

Bolaji Campbell is Professor of the Arts of Africa and the African Diaspora at the Rhode
Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island. Campbell holds a Ph.D. in Art History
from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published numerous essays in learned
academic journals and as chapters in books, his most recent works are Fabric of Immortality:
Ancestral Power, Performance and Agency in Egungun Artistry (AWP, 2020) and Painting for
the Gods: Art and Aesthetics of Yoruba Religious Murals (AWP, 2008).