Beyond wide-eyed angels: contemporary expressive culture in Ethiopia.

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Our intention in this issue is to present new research on Ethiopian expressive culture (1) that illuminates how some of the complexities of the modern experience, particularly within the post-Socialist period, influence art. To use a popular form of Amharic (2) rhetoric as metaphor, we hope to get at the seminna werq, the "wax and gold" of art making in Ethiopia (Levine 1972). (3) This term, which refers to the lost-wax casting process, is commonly found in Amharic poetry and song and in historical and contemporary discussions of politics. The "wax" refers to that which is obvious; the "gold" to that which is hidden. The "wax" is the fact that Ethiopian artists produce objects despite limited access to material and financial resources. In what is one of the world's lowest ranked countries on the human development index, people from more than seventy ethnic groups struggle to meet life's basic needs (United Nations Development Program 2007/2008:247). As we write this, thousands of Ethiopians are at risk of starvation due to famine. In a landlocked country with approximately eighty million people (the third highest population on the continent after Nigeria and Egypt), some of the hottest temperatures on earth, and great geographic diversity, droughts are inevitable (Pankhurst 1985/6). This paucity resonates among all of the country's cultural groups and shapes, to some degree, their material and performance-based expressions.

It is also obvious that specific types of artistic practices, namely those associated with the Ethiopian Orthodox Church (EOC), have come to be equated with "Ethiopian art," a status quo perpetuated by academic and popular texts alike and by museum displays in the West. As Raymond Silverman has argued, the country's myriad other "traditions of creativity" are often ignored (1999:3). (4) For example, in 1977 Stanislaw Chojnacki wrote, "Ethiopian art is almost exclusively religious and essentially Christian" (1977:44). Thirty years later, the Waiters Art Museum toured "Angels of Light: Ethiopian Art from the Waiters Art Museum," an exhibition focused exclusively on objects related to the practice of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity despite the seemingly more inclusive title. The "gold" we hope to reveal is twofold. This issue presents three articles that address some of the multiple forms of artistic expression that exist beyond the EOC and by extension, art practices that address non-Christian traditions. The other four articles offer new approaches to the study of Ethiopian Orthodox Christian art. By joining secular and sacred artforms and performance-based expressions, fields that have rarely been examined within the same tome, we hope to offer the reader a fuller appreciation of the diverse cultural expressions of Ethiopia within the broader framework of African art. (5)

When we began to formulate this special issue, we asked ourselves: what do readers of African Art know about the artistic practices and traditions of Ethiopia? Many enjoyed the first major US exhibition by an Ethiopian Orthodox church painter when "Painting Ethiopia: The Life and Work of Qes Adamu Tesfaw" opened at the Fowler Museum at UCLA. Many may also have wandered through "Continuity and Change: Three Generations of Ethiopian Artists" at the University of Florida's Harn Museum during the last ACASA Triennial. And Ethiopian artists such as Zerihun Yetmgeta (who won the grand prize at Dak'art in 1996), Wosene Kosrof, and Skunder Boghossian have been featured in this journal. Yet the majority of artists who have graduated from what is now the Addis Ababa University School of Fine Art and Design (SFAD; for the history of this institution see Achamyeleh Debela 2007) and the rural artists working throughout the country continue to create beyond our sphere of academic attention and certainly beyond the international market for African art.

Herein, seven scholars examine some of the emerging practices and the cultural structures that support artistic activity within Ethiopia but that are little known to the outside art world, whether academic or commercial. All of them examine shifts in art production and consumption, particularly with the advent of the post-Socialist regime (1991-present) during which Ethiopia has experienced an opening-up to the West and a significant increase in tourism. Elisabeth Biasio's contribution provides a comprehensive overview of the transition from church-based painting to the production of canvas paintings with increasingly secular themes for foreign clients. She refers to this latter genre as "contemporary painting in traditional style" (Biasio forthcoming). Neal Sobania and Raymond Silverman address the role of patronage and the art market in the production of innovative Christian painting and sculpture in Aksum, former capital of the Aksumite empire and now a major tourist destination in northeastern Ethiopia. Makda Teklemichael (6) highlights the lives and works of six women painters and sculptors who work as academically trained artists or within the EOC tradition. Despite the challenges they face, these women artists continue to create and survive in highly competitive male-dominated markets. Briana Simmons explores the consumption and display of imported Christian chromolithographs, today increasingly used by Orthodox practitioners to construct simultaneously a religious and a modern identity. While these contributors study traditions that are historically rooted in the EOC, Peri Klemm examines three new body arts made and worn by Muslim Oromo women near the Islamic center of Harar. She explores how these forms satisfy women's fashion sense while reinforcing and communicating cultural values. In another article on Muslim arts from Harar, Belle Asante Tarsitani demonstrates how changes in economic wealth and imported materials have impacted the production and consumption of Harari basketry, which continues to serve as a key marker of Harari ethnic identity. She demonstrates how younger weavers are constantly reinterpreting their art as meanings and materials shift through time. Lastly, Leah Niederstadt focuses on circus performances throughout Ethiopia as a means of disseminating information about social challenges such as early marriage and HIV/AIDS. While contributions on dance, drama, music, and ritual are admittedly lacking in this special issue, her discussion of children's circuses pays homage to the country's important performance arts traditions (Plastow 1996, 1998, 2004) and alerts readers to the need for future study in this direction (see Shelemay 1980, 1982a, 1982b, 1991).

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These contributions share a number of themes surrounding the creation and production of Ethiopian expressive culture, themes that are useful for discussions of contemporary practices throughout the continent. These themes include the process of commercialization of artistic practices, including the establishment of a capitalist art market; the effects of new materials/practices and foreign aesthetic preferences on art production and use; the emergence of middlemen; and the role of art as a means of communicating the social condition. These themes have been explored through careful analysis of the local, national, and global influences on artistic transformation. In all of the cases considered by our contributors, we see the emergence of new art forms and, in the case of the circuses studied by Niederstadt, performative practices. As artists challenge or build upon established rules and traditions, new material and performance-based expressions develop that hold the essence of older forms but are sometimes radically altered in appearance so that, to foreign eyes at least, their connections to the past are not always obvious. Our contributors, then, have largely looked beyond the visual in order to understand why, how, and for whom these transformations occur.

When we set out to present contemporary expressive culture in Ethiopia, we cast a wide net: from female academic artists to young circus performers; from religious paintings produced for the tourist market to imported images used by Orthodox Christians; from beaded fashions to baskets. As artistic acts that rely on established traditions to express current ideas, the art these papers address is work "of the time". This is particularly important because Ethiopia is often thought of only in terms of its legendary, ancient, and Christian past. This association takes visual form in the images of wide-eyed, winged angel heads that proliferate in guidebooks and exhibition catalogues (Fig. 1). We wanted to communicate instead how Ethiopian artists today think of themselves as contemporary actors actively engaged with their local communities and the wider world. In order to make sense of the contemporary objects and performances these artists create, each of our contributors has also considered the historical precursors from which these artworks and/or practices have emerged.

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Further, many of the contributions highlight the complex nature of contemporary expressive culture in Ethiopia, demonstrating that simple explanations of artforms, behaviors, and practices overlook the reality of artists' lived experiences, the work they produce, and the people who consume it. Our contributors affirm that "artistic traditions are not static, but dynamic processes" (Tarsitani) and that "as objects ... change through time and place, meaning also fluctuates and shifts" (Klemm).

In order to make sense of the dynamic nature of art from the traditional to the post-traditional and to describe it to the reader, our contributors draw on familiar and often problematic terms in African art history to discuss art styles and types: traditional, contemporary, folk, popular, and tourist art, artifact, and commodity. (8) To her credit, Biasio provides a clear explanation of her use of "popular art" and "folk art" and her conception of "contemporary painting in traditional style" while acknowledging the fluid nature of these categories, whereas Sobania and Silverman consciously avoid such classification. A detailed discussion of semantics and the applicability (or lack thereof) of Western categorization of contemporary African art is beyond the scope of this introduction (see Flam 1992, Kasfir 1993, Oguibe 1993, Pellizzi 1993). While categories often have more to do with our disciplines and approaches than with indigenous Ethiopian conceptions of objects and practices, we feel our contributors have utilized terms that best help them communicate the structure of specific art forms and practices.

ART PRODUCTION WITHIN THE MODERN HISTORICAL PERIOD

As the topics covered by our contributors attest, contemporary expressive culture in Ethiopia consists of a range of forms and practices. Many of these urban and rural-based practices have been significantly influenced by socio-political events and by the influx of new ideas, aesthetic inspirations, and materials over time. We examine some of these events through the lens of three distinct periods (see Nagy 2007): the imperial regimes of Emperors Menelik II and Haile Selassie I (1889-1974); the Derg (8) government (1974-1991); and the post-Socialist period (1991-present).

Located in the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia is surrounded by Djibouti, Eritrea, Kenya, Somalia/Somaliland, and the Sudan. This territory has long been a crossroads for trade and cultural exchange between sub-Saharan and northern Africa, the Middle East, and beyond. From 300 BCE into the eighth century CE, the Aksumite empire dominated trade in northeast Africa and the southern Arabian peninsula; its administrative and political center Aksum remains important today as the holiest city of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity. Christianity arrived in Ethiopia around 330 CE when the Aksumite King Ezana adopted the religion; Islam arrived a few centuries later. The country is home to numerically equal Muslim and Christian populations with a small percentage of followers of Judaism--now nearly all moved to Israel--and local religions; a small, but growing, number of Christians belong to Evangelical, non-Orthodox churches. Both Christianity and Islam have been important factors in the continued exchange between Ethiopia and the rest of the world, with Portuguese missionaries, European and Asian artisans, and Muslim traders and educators visiting various kingdoms and emirates in what is now Ethiopia.

Art During the Reigns of Emperors Menelik II and Haile Selassie I (1889-1974). Until the nineteenth century, the Christian regions of Ethiopia were ruled by a series of rival kings, princes, and the occasional queen. As Makda Teklemichael and Elisabeth Biasio both mention, artistic production within the EOC was long fostered by the desire of the aristocracy to gain political favor with the ecclesiastical elite and to demonstrate power, piety, and devotion to the church. When Christian monarchs of the northern highlands were challenged by Muslim rivals in the east and Oromo kingdoms in the south, the EOC became a central vehicle for the unification and mobilization of the Christian population. By the mid-nineteenth century, the foundations of a centralized state power began to emerge with the rise of Emperor Tewodros II (r. 1855-68). During his reign and those of his successors, the government came to be dominated by the culture of the northern Christian highlands, and even more particularly by the art, culture, and language of the Amhara (Levine 1972). Independent chiefdoms, kingdoms and, in the case of Harar, an emirate were incorporated into the Ethiopian empire, which defeated Italian attempts at colonization at the Battle of Adowa in 1896 and again following occupation from 1935-41.

As part of their efforts to consolidate social and economic power, particularly with regard to the periphery, Ethiopia's nineteenth and twentieth century emperors built churches and monuments throughout the country and Emperor Haile Selassie (r. 1930-1974) erected museums and theaters in each provincial center. He also enabled the establishment the SFAD, the Yared School of Music, and what is now the Ethiopian Tourism and Trading Enterprise. Increasing numbers of foreigners visited Ethiopia, which was often at the forefront of international news due to the Emperor's famous speech at the League of Nations in 1936, his position as the key icon of the newly emerging Caribbean religion Rastafarianism, and Addis Ababa's role as the base for the Organization of African Unity and the Economic Commission for Africa. Recurring droughts and the growing economic disparity between the wealthy elite and the subsistence-farming majority became cause for social unrest. Reacting to what many saw as imperial neglect during famine, university students, intellectuals, and some members of the military began questioning the Emperor's regime and in 1974, he was overthrown.

Until the Derg regime, paintings depicting scenes of daily life, the legend of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon, and warrior saints on horseback decorated public spaces like hotels and tej baitotch (honey wine bars) and were for sale in numerous galleries throughout the capital (Fig. 2). Beginning in the early 1960s, galleries in Addis Ababa sold contemporary fine art painting and sculpture produced by graduates of the SFAD, who regularly traveled abroad for further study or exhibitions (Achamyeleh Debela 2007, Heran Sereke-Brhan and Shiferaw Bekele 2007). Meanwhile, the capital's tourist shops overflowed with baskets, jewelry, beads, coins, textiles, and objects made from wood, horn, ivory, and bone as well as the wood panel icon paintings described in Sobania and Silverman's article, all for sale to the increasing number of foreign tourists, expatriate residents, and Diasporic Ethiopians eager to explore the land of wide-eyed angels and "thirteen months of sunshine." (9)

Art During the Derg (1974-1991). Under Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, the Derg regime's social and economic reforms and ideological restructuring dramatically affected the art scene. Tourism to Ethiopia rapidly declined, causing further disruption of the country's already unstable economic and political situation. Many artists and theater practitioners defected to the West and those who remained were forced to produce propaganda for the Socialist state (Geta Mekonnen 2007). The government promoted the production of mural art and monumental sculpture as well as graphic design for innumerable political posters. As Makda Teklemichael mentions, women were prominently featured in such propaganda, as were peasant farmers and student activists, depicted as strong, committed Socialists working toward the downfall of the land-holding elites and proclaiming the slogan "Land to the Tiller." Fine art painters were encouraged to generate work in a socio-realist style, which was discarded when the regime fell in 1991, while church-trained artists returned to producing almost exclusively for the EOC, which continued in tandem with anti-religious communist ideals. Many fine art galleries and boutiques closed. Dramatic arts prospered, however, as theater was used to disseminate government propaganda and Ethiopians attended en masse to demonstrate their allegiance to the regime (see Plastow 1996, 1998a, 1998b). Interestingly, few of the imperial-era monuments were defaced or torn down, although many Socialist monuments were also erected, including massive arches over the roads entering what was then called Abiot (Revolution) Square in Addis Ababa. Images of Lenin, Stalin, and occasionally Marx were affixed to bridges and other structures along roads throughout Ethiopia and depicted in murals which have since been painted over. Today, several of the Derg-era monuments have been appropriated and re-imagined in support of regional state governments (Fig. 3).

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The widespread famine of the mid-1980s created worldwide media attention and generated a public image of Ethiopia as a country of starving, impoverished people dominated by a corrupt government, in need of assistance from the international community, that persists to this day. An insurgency began almost immediately and in May 1991, revolutionary forces led by the Tigrai People's Liberation Front (TPLF) and the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) overthrew the Socialist regime. Their success can be attributed in part to the fact that the Derg's land and property reforms failed miserably while the regime's militant and brutal nature alienated the very peasants, students, and intellectuals who originally supported it. Since August 1995, the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) has governed Ethiopia under a policy of ethnic federalism.

Art During the Post-Socialist Period (1991-Present). Since 1991, artistic practices and traditions have experienced a renaissance. The opening up of Ethiopia to the West ended nearly two decades of orientation toward the former Soviet Union and its Socialist allies. Investment capital from the Diaspora and foreign corporations began to flow into Ethiopia, accompanied by a similar resurgence in international aid. Both the commercial and nonprofit sectors grew markedly as did the number of expatriate residents and Ethiopians staffing them. Therefore, the number of people supporting the art community in Addis Ababa grew, as both Ethiopians and ferengi (foreigners) began to patronize azmeri baitotch (folkloric performance venues), contemporary fine art galleries, and restaurants-cum-galleries. Government restrictions on the importation of goods and media were eased, allowing Ethiopians to view television programs and movies from North America, Europe, and India and thus become aware of and imitate global youth culture. Tied to all of this was the return of foreign tourists, whose numbers have steadily increased since 1991.

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With the return of foreigners and Diasporic Ethiopians, several art galleries were reopened or established, including Goshu Gallery, run by artists Worku and Barbara Goshu, Asni Gallery, which was founded by Konjit Seyoum, and Zoma Contemporary Art Center (ZCAC), established in 2001 by Meskerem Assegued. In addition, dozens of young SFAD graduates run individual and group studios and travel abroad for exhibitions and workshops, or attend those offered by Asni Gallery and ZCAC. A few artists, including Engdaget Legesse, split their time between Europe and Ethiopia, while others, such as Mulugeta Gebrekidan, are based full-time in Addis Ababa (Fig. 4). A strong cohort of senior artists, several of whom teach at the SFAD, continue to exhibit at home and abroad while a few artists in exile have returned from abroad to live again in Addis Ababa. Many of these artists were featured in the exhibition "Continuity and Change," while Diasporic Ethiopian artists, including Mickael Bethe-Selassie, were the focus of "Ethiopian Passages: Contemporary Art from the Diaspora" at the National Museum of African Art in 2003.

Along with these exhibitions, "Painting Ethiopia" was preceded by several exhibitions of EOC art, although none of these focused on the work of an individual artist and many curators exhibited the artworks within the context of Byzantine and/or Medieval art. Several of these shows originated from the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, MD. Notable exceptions have been exhibitions organized by Girma Fisseha, formerly curator at the Staatliche Museum fur Volkerkunde in Munich, Germany, and Jacques Mercier's 1992 exhibition "La Roi Salomon et les Maitres du Regard: Art et Medecine en Ethiopie" A number of commercial exhibitions have also been held, including several organized by London-based dealer Sam Fogg (Niederstadt 2007).

Aside from contemporary painting and sculpture produced by academically trained artists and those created by artists like Qes Adamu Tesfaw and others mentioned in Sobania and Silverman's contribution, an increasing variety of indigenous art forms have been modified and commodified for local and, increasingly, tourist consumption, for visitors find such objects as interesting as the Ethiopians who make and use them. Thus, one finds gourd containers decorated with pen tops, keys, and zippers, and radios protected and adorned with popular cloth covers and buttons. Similarly, wooden headrests, commonly used throughout southern Ethiopia to protect men's elaborate hairstyles, are often ornately carved and include handles braided from leather or wire. New types of novelty objects made of sorghum stalks, cornhusks, mud, feathers, and cloth have been creatively constructed specifically with the tourist art market in mind, which caters both to visiting ferengi and Diasporic Ethiopians (Fig. 5). Anyone driving along Ethiopia's new asphalt roads is certain to see painted billboards welcoming tourists or offering educational messages to those who pass by (Fig. 6).

APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF ETHIOPIAN ORTHODOX OBJECTS AND NON-CHRISTIAN ART

Christian Traditions. Although historical manuscripts, icon panel paintings, metal crosses, and personal healing scrolls from Ethiopian churches and monasteries began leaving the country with the advent of European visitors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such objects largely came to the attention of foreign scholars and collectors in the late 1960s, when EOC artworks began to generate considerable recognition and to circulate as objects of aesthetic appreciation in European and American museums and private collections. These works were not, however, easily posited among the common museum holdings of African art at the time, which were comprised mostly of abstracted, three-dimensional, wooden masks and sculpture. Further, Ethiopia's popular image as an ancient Christian empire lacking the shared history of a colonial experience and the postcolonial conditions of its African neighbors placed--and still places--the country as an "other" in relation to the body of experience that has shaped what most African art historians study. Certainly it can be argued that Ethiopia's unique history, written languages, and Orthodox Christian faith are atypical within a broader African context. Taking this argument one step further, however, and considering the artistic feats of Ethiopia as "non-African," as evident by the way that Ethiopian art is classified in many major museums, comes dangerously close to falling prey to the same colonial-era Western arguments that Great Zimbabwe and ancient Benin bronzes were not made by Africans. While ethnographers began documenting the rich and varied architectural and liturgical arts in Ethiopia before African art emerged as a discipline in its own right in the US, their findings, particularly the analysis of the historic Christian painting tradition, were largely ignored by Africanists as "too different" Instead Ethiopian devotional images were couched in the historical genres of Coptic and medieval Christian European traditions.

Most historical investigation of artistic religious practice has been via a Western art historical approach rooted in Panofskian iconographic analysis and explained in light of its formal relationship to European church painting. Scholars have attributed the motivation for the diverse assortment of intact illuminated manuscript, religious icons, and architecture that pre-date the eighteenth century to Paleo-Christian, Byzantine-Greek, Coptic, Nubian, Arabic, Armenian, and Portuguese models (Bosc-Tiesse and Wion 2005; Chojnacki 1983, 1989; Di Salvo 1999; Heldman 1994, 1998; Perczel 1983; Ramos with Boavida 2004). Twelfth century codices with small vignettes written in the ancient script Ge'ez are discussed in relation to their affinity to Syrian, Egyptian, or Armenian bibles (Perczel 1983:27).

Certainly by the mid-sixteenth century, Italian paintings of the Virgin and Child were found in monasteries, with stylistic affinities to Ethiopian paintings and their presence affirms that Italian devotional images were incorporated into the body of Ethiopian church relics from then onward. Iconographic similarities are also discernible in paintings from the mid-sixteenth century to the eighteenth century, known as the Gondarene Period. But the generalized and geometric style of Ethiopian painting, which emphasizes dark contour lines, flat planes of paint, patterning, and folds, is also unique (Fig. 7). By employing a Western art historical construct concerned with issues of connoisseurship, iconography, stylistic innovation, and artistic genius and focusing on "borrowed" Christian themes from Western and Byzantine sources, scholars lose sight of any sense of a unique Ethiopian aesthetic, and by extension, the inherent African identity of the work produced by painters trained within the traditions of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. It is our hope that an assessment of local and regional inspirations and methods drawn from Ethiopian systems of thought and aesthetics will figure more prominently in future scholarship of Ethiopian Orthodox art.

Non-Christian Art Traditions. (10) With the exception of a short period in the 1960s and early 1970s (when artists such as Skunder Boghossian and Gebre Kristos Desta were active in the international art world), prior to the mid 1990s, contemporary Ethiopian painters had not received significant recognition on the international modern art scene. Beginning with publications such as Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa (Deliss 1995) and the 2003 solo exhibition "My Ethiopia: Recent Paintings by Wosene Worke Kosrof," academically trained Ethiopian artists have taken a more prominent position in the contemporary African art field. Furthermore, the exceptional exhibition "Ethiopia: Traditions of Creativity" and its follow-up publication at last brought named, contemporary, male and female Ethiopian artists of various cultural groups and religions to the attention of scholars in African art history and elevated Ethiopian "craft" to a fine art standard in the process. For the first time, Tabita Hatuti, a rural female potter, and Amina Ismail Sherifa, an urban basket maker, were paired alongside Zerihun Yetmgeta, an academically trained artist, and Qes Adamu Tesfaw, a now internationally recognized church painter.

A permanent exhibition that features the material and expressive culture of underrepresented ethnic groups like the Sidamo, Gurage, and Oromo is now on display in Addis Ababa. The reinstallation of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies Museum of ethnographic objects at Addis Ababa University took place late in 2002. The old ethnographic museum, installed in 1963 on the second floor of Ras Makonnen Hall, part of Emperor Haile Selassie's former palace complex, currently displays cultural objects from dozens of ethnic groups in a thematic display strategy of the human life cycle; the previous exhibition loosely organized objects according to their cultural group (Saurat et al. 1989). Funded primarily by foreign embassies and cultural centers in Addis Ababa, the exhibition resulted from mounting pressure to present a holistic review of Ethiopian diversity due to several factors, including the government's agenda to acknowledge material culture as part of national heritage, the diverse ethnic background of the museum's staff, expatriate curatorial ideas and, of course, the interests of the donors. Relatively few Ethiopians visit Addis Ababa University or ever see the exhibition, especially those from the ethnic groups most represented. For example, the visual presence of the Oromo and other peripheral groups as a living, modern people is spatially marginalized on the campus grounds, just footsteps away from their representation within the IES museum, revealing the inclusive/exclusive nature of higher education in Ethiopia. Likewise, when Klemm curated an exhibition of Oromo, Somali, Harari, and Argobba women's costumes in this space in 2000, few students and community members from these ethnic groups saw the exhibition. The problems of accessibility, due to limited access to higher education and cultural institutions, the lack of transportation, and a vast and varied terrain, often limit Ethiopians' exposure to artistic practices outside their regions and by other ethnic groups.

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The texts and exhibitions mentioned above have drawn attention to Ethiopia and, in many instances, enabled a fuller appreciation of the varied creative expressions practiced throughout the country. While the main body of literature devoted to the study of Ethiopian art continues to focus on the sacred expressions of the Christian highlands and research on non-Christian traditions tends to be regarded as "material culture," (11) the articles by Klemm, Niederstadt, and Tarsitani contribute to a recent surge in revisionist scholarship drawing attention to the aesthetic expressions of traditionally subordinated peoples throughout the country. In this scholarship, the great feats that Ethiopian school children study of Yohannis IV (r. 1872-89), who spread the Abyssinian empire northward, and Menelik II (r. 1889-1913), who expanded the empire southward and defeated the Italian imperial forces at the Battle of Adowa, have begun to be recast as a form of internal colonization by scholars sympathetic to the voices of the periphery. Ethnic groups such as the Anuak, Gurage, Oromo, Sidamo, Somali, and Wolaita make up a sizable portion of the Ethiopian population but have not yet received equal access to political, social, and economic power. Asafa Jalata views Oromo nationalism, for example, as "a program of national liberation" grounded in "the common experience of colonial oppression" (1998: 27).

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In the popular imagination, however, Ethiopia carries with it the image of a unified African monarchy that defeated multiple attempts at European colonization and "offered a resplendent symbol of Black Power" (Lewis 1983:4). When Ghana gained independence in 1957, Nkrumah and his council modeled the new Ghanaian flag with the red, yellow, and green stripes of the Ethiopian flag in an attempt to create a pan-African symbol. Rastafarianism, especially in the Caribbean world, advocates Ethiopia as the biblical center of African civilization and a symbol of unity and strength against colonial supremacy. For the broader African Diaspora, Ethiopia, as a country free from Western political domination, has become an image of hope and freedom. During the Italian Occupation (1936-41), for example, displaced Africans worldwide organized public protests and tried to enlist in the Ethiopian army. Beyond serving as a symbol of Black Power, Ethiopia has also become the model of "authentic" Africa through the photographic gaze. In the pages of African Arts and elsewhere, many of us have engaged in critical debate concerning the most widely disseminated images of Africa's people in the coffee table books of Carol Fisher and Angela Beckwith and the photographers they have inspired, some of whom are of Ethiopian descent (Appiah 1999; Klemm 2007; Roberts 2001, 2008; Turton 2004; Viditz-Ward 2000). They have done more perhaps than any of us in establishing an image of Ethiopia that consists largely of the coy smiles of exotic, lip-plugged young women in opulent beadwork and body paint, virile, semi-nude young men with hair mudpacks and feathers, and innumerable rural scenes whitewashed of white influence (Beckwith and Fisher 1999, 2002; Beckwith, Fisher, and Hancock 1990).

A body of literature on representation and political consciousness in Ethiopia has crystallized around two opposing forces: those in the ruling Abyssinian core of highland Christian Ethiopia and those on the periphery. Important texts devoted to the latter have brought to light a wealth of material on cultural and socio-political institutions, the development of political consciousness, and the experience of these marginalized groups within the Ethiopian empire (Donham and James 1986; Lewis 1983; Fukui and Markakis 1994; Baxter, Hutlin, and Triulzi 1994; James 2007; Freeman 2002). Scholars are now documenting the challenges faced by underrepresented groups who are not predominantly Christian, who do not follow the culture of the northern Christian highlands, and who have been largely ignored or stifled by the EPRDF in their struggle for self-determinacy (Freeman and Pankhurst 2003).

Yet, with relatively few exceptions (see Freeman 2002, James 2007), this research has paid little attention to related artistic manifestations. The articles in this volume on the Oromo and Harari and on the multi-ethnic representations of Ethiopia's children's circuses extend recent challenges to the representation of the country as a homogenous ancient Christian center and of its material heritage as a product only of the EOC. The remaining contributions explore artistic practices of the EOC from a new perspective that considers these as contemporary expressions with a strong emphasis on the effects of the art market and on personal agency. In a single issue of African Arts it is, of course, impossible to cover the variety and vibrancy of forms and practices of expressive culture in Ethiopia. This special issue is but a step in the right direction and, ironically, a return to the early days of the journal when numerous articles focused on Ethiopian art, albeit that of the EOC. (12) It is our hope that all of the contributors--to whom we extend our thanks for their efforts--will continue their research into contemporary expressive culture in Ethiopia and that, perhaps, others will be inspired to join them.

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Notes

(1) We use "expressive culture" here to refer to aesthetic practices in the broadest sense: the visual and invisible, the secular and the sacred, the material and performative.

(2) Under the current regime, regional state governments operate in the dominant language of their region. Ethiopia's national language, however, remains Amharic, the language of government and education during the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.

(3) A number of systems have been developed for transliterating the Ge'ez script, commonly referred to as fidel, into the Latin alphabet, but no standard yet exists. We have chosen to transliterate these languages without using diacritical marks and into a form that renders them easily readable and that approximates as closely as possible the way in which they would be pronounced in their original language. The exception is proper names, which are often transliterated differently, depending on personal preference or historical precedent. For example, the name "Mariam" may also appear as "Maryam."

(4) It has now been over a decade since Ray Silverman curated "Ethiopia: Traditions of Creativity," which opened at the Michigan State University Museum in 1994 to accompany the Twelfth International Conference of Ethiopian Studies.

(5) Work that addresses both Ethiopian Orthodox Christian and non-Christian art include Percze1 1983 and Silverman 1999.

(6) For the large majority of Ethiopians, their second name, what we would consider a surname or family name, is that of their father. In Ethiopia, individuals are referred to by their title, if applicable, and their first name. Therefore, throughout this issue, contributors have referred to Ethiopians by their first name, sometime with accompanying title, along with their father's name or by their first name alone.

(7) In their forthcoming article, "Ethiopian Traditions of Creativity: 'Art' or 'Handicraft'?" Silverman and Sobania explore the usefulness of the terms "popular" and "folk" when discussing Ethiopian art.

(8) An Amharic word meaning "committee," Derg is the popular term used to refer to the Socialist regime.

(9) The slogan, which was coined by Ethiopia's first Minister of Tourism Habte Selassie Tafesse in the early 1960s, refers to the fact that Ethiopia operates on an annual calendar of twelve months of thirty days each and a thirteenth month of five or six days.

(10) We recognize that we fall prey to some of the same problems of categorization we discussed earlier by dividing our discussion of contemporary Ethiopian art into "Christian" and "non-Christian." We are not, however, attempting to indicate a distinction between sacred and secular. As Biasio and Sobania and Silverman have shown, Christian painting can be used in sacred and secular contexts depending on by whom, for whom, and for what reasons artworks are commissioned or purchased. The same can be true for non-Christian traditions and artforms. Thus, as we use them, the categories of "Christian" and "non-Christian" are intended to reflect differences in artist training and subject matter, rather than a distinction between sacred and secular.

(11) At the 15th Conference of Ethiopian Studies in Hamburg in 2003, art historian Klemm's paper on Oromo women's personal arts was placed within the Anthropology panels while Sobania and Silverman's paper on patrons and artists in the Highlands was placed in the Arts section. See Sobania and Silverman (forthcoming) for a critique of conference categorization.

(12) JeremyCoote, personal communication, July 2008.