New African Masquerades

New African Masquerades - Artistic Innovations and Collaborations.

Masquerade has long stood as the iconic African performance genre, and yet the artist who create masquerades are often unacknowledged and underrepresented in exhibitions and publications. New African Masquerades showcases the artworks and voices of individual creators and offers a fresh take on the vitality of masquerade arts. The volume makes clear that creativity in African masking is fundamentally contemporary and challenges both the widely held ideas of the "anonymous African artist" and assumptions that masquerade is an unchanging, static art form solely rooted to the distant past.

This innovative publication shares the stories of four West African masquerade artist: Herve Youmbi (Cameroon), David Sanou (Burkina Faso), Chief Ekpenyong Bassey Nsa (Nigeria), and Sheku "Goldfinger" Fofanah (Sierra Leone). It explores their motivations, their artistic choices, the patronage and economic networks with which they engage, and how the artist adapt their respective genres in response to current circumstances and changing trends locally and globally.