Zoë S. Strother is an art historian. She serves as Riggio Professor of African Art at Columbia University. Her work focuses on 20th and 21st-century Central and West African art history. She graduated from Yale University. Strother was a 2000 Guggenheim Fellow. Her book ''Inventing Masks'' won the 2001 Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publication Award from the Arts Council of the African Studies Association. In it she describes masks as part of a larger performance and thus creative process. Against the

Franz Boas Franz Uri Boas (July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942) was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". His work is associated with the movements known as historical ...

vein of interpreting African art such as masks as a conservative matter of tradition, Strother’s fieldwork finds they are a site of invention and novelty, demonstrating the agency of the creators and wearers. Critics praised the book, saying the cover blurbs were “not hyperbole”.

Works

* ''Inventing Masks: Agency and History in the Art of the Central Pende'' ( University of Chicago Press, 1998) , * ''Pende'' (5 Continents Editions, 2008) * ''Vladimir Markov and Russian Primitivism: A Charter for the Avant-Garde' with Jeremy Howard and Irēna Bužinska (Ashgate, 2015) , * ''Humor and Violence: Seeing Europeans in Central African Art, 1850-1997'' (

Indiana University Press Indiana University Press, also known as IU Press, is an academic publisher founded in 1950 at Indiana University that specializes in the humanities and social sciences. Its headquarters are located in Bloomington, Indiana. IU Press publishes 140 ...

, 2016) ,

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Strother, Z.S. Living people Columbia University people Historians of African art American women art historians American art historians Year of birth missing (living people) Yale University alumni