by Allen F. Roberts (Editor), Tom Joyce (Editor), Marla C. Berns (Editor)

Striking Iron combines interdisciplinary scholarship with vivid illustrations to offer the most comprehensive treatment of the blacksmith's art in sub-Saharan Africa to date. For more than two millennia, African blacksmiths have transformed one of Earth's most basic natural resources into objects of life-changing utility, empowerment, prestige, spiritual potency, and astonishing artistry-shaping African cultures in the most fundamental ways.

Interspersed throughout are photographs of more than 250 diverse works from over 100 ethnic groups-including tools, blades, currencies, wood sculptures studded with iron, musical instruments, and accoutrements - with field photographs documenting blacksmiths at work and objects in use. Seventeen contributors write from the disciplinary perspectives of art history, art, anthropology, archaeology, history, and astronomy, examining how the blacksmiths' virtuosity can harness powers of the natural and spiritual worlds, effect change and ensure protection, assist with life's challenges and transitions, and enhance the efficacies of sacred acts.

with Enid Schildkrout

Dinastia y Divinidad: Arte Ife en Antiqua Nigeria. Santander, Spain: Fundacion Marcelino Botin and the Museum for African Art, NY. 521 pp.

[2010 editions: Kingdom of Ife: Sculptures from West Africa. (with Enid Schildkrout). London: The British Museum Press and the Museum for African Art, NY. 184 pp. and Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art in Ancient Nigeria (with Enid Schildkrout). New York: Museum for African Art, 184 pp.  currently being sold/distributed by University of Washington Press]

Dynasty and Divinity presents a major part of the extraordinary body of ancient Ife art in terra-cotta, stone, and metal, dating from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries. Artists at Ife, the ancient city-state of the Yoruba people of West Africa (located in present-day southwestern Nigeria), created sculpture that ranks among the most aesthetically striking and technically sophisticated in the world. The creative range of Ife art is seen here through a diversity of objects that includes handsome idealized portrait heads, exquisite miniatures, expressive caricatures of old age, lively animals, and sculptures showing the impressive regalia worn by Ife's kings and queens. Together, these illuminate one of the world's greatest art centers and demonstrate the technological sophistication of Ife artists, as well as the rich aesthetic language they developed in order to convey ideas about worldly and divine power.

Dynasty and Divinity accompanies an exhibition co-organized by the Museum for African Art, New York City, and the Fundacion Marcelino Botin, Santander, Spain, in collaboration with the National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Nigeria. The exhibition will appear at the British Museum, London, as Kingdom of Ife: Sculptures of West Africa.

Editor
Indiana University Press. 704 pp. with DVD

This book addresses the diversity of belief and practice, audiences, gender, reception, hybridity, commodification, globalization, dispersal, and religious mutation of Mami Wata rituals. It includes more than 129 images and a supplemental DVD featuring nearly 500 images, several photographic essays, and film clips of performances/rituals, and music. Winner of the 2011 ACASA Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publication Award

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Henry John Drewal with contributions by Marilyn Houlberg, Bogumil Jewsiewicki, Amy L. Noell, John W. Nunley, and Jill Salmons
Los Angeles: Fowler Museum of UCLA and University of Washington Press, 227 pp.

This book traces the visual cultures and histories of Mami Wata and other African water divinities. Mami Wata, often portrayed with the head and torso of a woman and the tail of a fish, is at once beautiful, jealous, generous, seductive, and potentially deadly. A water spirit widely known across Africa and the African diaspora, her origins are said to lie "overseas," although she has been thoroughly incorporated into local beliefs and practics. She can bring good fortune in the form of money, and her power increased between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, the era of growing international trade between Africa and the rest of the world. Her name, which may be translated as "Mother Water" or "Mistress Water," is pidgin English, a language developed to lubricate trade. Africans forcibly carried across the Atlantic as part of that "trade" brought with them their beliefs and practices honoring Mami Wata and other ancestral deities.

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Catalogue essay, Sumter Gallery, SC
UW-Madison

Brochure accompanying exhibition in the Design Gallery
UW-Madison

Elvehjem Museum of Art
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Bulletin/Biennial Report 2001- 2003

Gallery Guide
Elvehjem Museum of Art

Curatorial Consultant
Design Gallery, UW-Madison, Spring.

(with John Mason)
Los Angeles : Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 288 pp. (Finalist, Herskovits Award of ASA, 1999 and ACASA Arnold Rubin Award, 2001)

The sights and sounds of the Yoruba cosmos are made manifest through the pervasive use of beads. This spectacular book represents a collaboration between art historian Henry John Drewal and Yoruba priest John Mason. From the forests of Africa a thousand years ago to the bustling cities of New York, Havana, and Salvador, today, Yoruba; religion has used beads to convey the artistic spirit and deep connection to the other world that its practitioners feel. This beautifully illustrated volume traces the history of the beads, their use, and Yoruba aesthetics and artistry.

Editor with introduction
Elvehjem Museum Of Art Bulletin, 1993-5

(with Rowland Abiodun and John Pemberton III)
Editor with essay. Smithsonian Institution Press with the support of the Societé Suisse d'Études Africaines and the Rietberg Museum, Switzerland. 275 pp.

From Booklist
Yoruba artwork is at once powerfully expressive and technically adept. In a succession of scholarly essays, 18 experts delineate recent findings on the traditions and forms of this West African art. Identifying individual artists, tracing the development of stylistic trends, analyzing motifs, and linking Yoruba art with "praise poetry" (known as oriki) are some of the areas covered. Although academic, the text is nonetheless animated by the writers' great involvement with and enthusiasm for topics that yield ample material for rumination and research. The culminating essay by John Mason offers a particularly exciting examination of the development of Yoruba-American art and artists, from Cuba to New York City and South Carolina. Color illustrations will be included, along with black-and-white images of altars and shrines, carved trays, wooden heads, figurative posts and doors, and other artifacts.
Alice Joyce

From Book News, Inc.
With 27 color reproductions and 81 photographs--many published for the first time--accompanying essays by 18 noted Yoruba cultural historians, this volume documents the full spectrum of Yoruba culture, extending beyond the visual arts to examine the Yoruba use of such oral traditions as singing and chanting, as well as drumming, dance, and other artistic expressions, including an Ifa divination ritual that involves an interplay of arts.
Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

From Midwest Book Review
The cultural legacy of the Yoruba peoples is revealed in a strong collection which examines the artist's legacy and social influences and the Yoruba's influence on African arts as a whole. Striking black and white and color images pepper a collection which reveals the works of carvers, singers, painters, and a host of Yoruba artists from many different walks of life. A compelling collection.

(with Rowland Abiodun and John Pemberton III)
Zurich : Rietberg Museum . 103 pp.

(with John Pemberton III and Rowland Abiodun)
New York : Alfred Knopf and The Center for African Art. 256 pp.

From Publishers Weekly
Arising around A.D. 800, the ancient, walled Yoruba kingdoms were complex city states headed by sacred rulers, both male and female. Their modern descendants, Yoruba-speaking peoples of Nigeria and Benin, have preserved traditional art forms rooted in a view of the cosmos as alive and in constant flux. The stunning catalogue of a traveling exhibition, this volume serves as a window onto a world where "character is beauty," where rebirth occurs continuously and where spirits, gods and the life force are all-pervasive. Naturalistic terracotta heads, beaded crowns, ceremonial staffs topped with stylized birds, and objects in ivory, bronze, stone and wood display rare artistry. Many of the pieces shown are best understood in a ritual context, provided by Drewal, an art historian at Cleveland State University, and Pemberton, a professor of religion at Amherst.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Robert Thompson has called the study of Yoruba art "the Shakespeare studies of African art" because so much research has been focused on this one African culture. This book, which accompanies a major exhibition, fully justifies all that scholarly attention. Yoruba-speaking peoples are the largest ethnic group in Africa, one which has been urbanized for over 1000 years. The visual arts of the Yoruba are thoroughly explored as aesthetic objects in their social, religious, political, and historical contexts. This book, which deserves the highest recommendation, may well be the finest example of African art scholarship yet published.
- Eugene C. Burt, Seattle
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

(with David Driskell)
Los Angeles : The California Afro-American Museum . 104 pp.

The Cleveland Museum of Art

Special issue of Art Journal
Summer 1988

Hempstead , New York : Hofstra University . 31 pp.

(with Margaret Thompson Drewal)
Bloomington : Indiana University Press. 352 pp. [2nd Edition, 1990.]

Atlanta : The High Museum of Art. 100 pp.

Museum of African Art (1977) 58 pp.

Afro-American Cultural Center
Cleveland State University
Catalog which accompanies permanent collection