Identifying and celebrating the creativity and individuality of named African artists has been a challenge and a goal in the history of African art-historical studies since before mid-twentieth century. For Yorùba, to name persons is to bring them into existence as social beings and to help them shape and define their own destiny. As Yorùbá say, orukọ, nrọ̀ ni, “a person's name directs actions and behavior” (Drewal, Pemberton, and Abiodun 1989: 26). The German “art anthropologist” Hans Himmelheber (Fischer and Himmelhaber 1960; Himmelhaber 1976) was perhaps the first to take this effort seriously with his pioneering studies of specific master sculptors in Côte d'Ivoire and elsewhere in Africa from the 1930s. It was he who, as a visiting professor at Columbia University in 1968-69, encouraged me to write about my own apprenticeship with the Yorùbá artist Ṣanusi in a study that was eventually published (Drewal 1980...

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