The "traditional" panels.

Attending the Triennial always reminds me of the Igbo proverb about masquerades: you certainly can't stand in one spot and take it all in. The symposium in St. Thomas promised to be especially frenzied. Not only were there five or six panels happening simultaneously in every time slot, but there was the additional draw of Carnival--and the ultimate temptation for someone from chilly Chicago, the warm and gentle water of the Caribbean Sea.

The idyllic setting certainly helped to make this meeting mellower than others, as did the excellent planning by its organizers. But equally important was the fact that I did not have to choose between my interests in "traditional" and "contemporary" African art in deciding which panels to attend. Very few were of the type that dominated earlier Triennials, concerned with the arts of a single ethnic group or a particular ritual context and presented in a timeless ethnographic present. In St. Thomas far more panels blurred the boundaries between traditional art and contemporary art, demonstrating their interconnectedness and simultaneity. Some of the titles alone vividly convey the vision of traditional African art as evolving, creative, and relevant to the world today: "Masks: Transformations, Identities, and Adaptability in Contemporary Society" (chaired by Laurel Birch Aguilar), "`Power Objects' in the New Millennium" (Elisabeth Cameron), "Transitions and Continuities in Cultural Production/Art from KwaZulu-Natal" (Juliet Armstrong), "Active Arts of Africa and Its Diasporas" (Allen Roberts), and "Wearable Tradition: Africa and the Idea of Africa in Contemporary Fashion" (Victoria Rovine and Kristyne Loughran). These were just a few of the panels that demonstrated the continuing vitality of traditional African art.

Herbert M. Cole's panel, "Woman and Child in African and Diaspora Art," provided an especially well-balanced example of the boundary-crossing approach in evidence at the conference. The mother and child is an icon of traditional African sculpture that Cole has explored before, but in his introduction he compared these staple images with less familiar contemporary examples, mostly from South Africa, that also represent mothers with children. This paper helped me see some of the best-known images of African art in a new light. While the traditional representations of maternity are frequently used to support male-dominated institutions, the newer ones--often the work of women artists--express a more female subjectivity. Other presentations on the panel examined this motif: in ancient rock paintings of South Africa (Bert Woodhouse), in fifteenth-century Ethiopian Christian images of the Madonna and child (Michelle Duran-MacLure), and in works by African American women artists (Earnestine Jenkins) and by South African artist Penny Siopis (Elizabeth Rankin).

Several individual papers for other panels also directly addressed the interface between "traditional" and "contemporary" arts. Till Forster compared "traditional" Senufo funerary sculpture with memorial arts in the new media of video, photography, and painting to determine whether the idea of the ancestor changes in meaning as its image changes in form. Silvia Forni analyzed the complex interplay of art and craft, tradition and modernity, and African and Western aesthetics presented by the Presbyterian Pottery Project in the Cameroon Grasslands. Karen Milbourne discussed a Lozi royal ritual invented during the colonial period and reinvented more recently to reflect the changing political climate. Barbara Frank investigated the issues raised by contemporary artists who "mine the canon" of traditional African art by appropriating images. While these are just a few of the more notable papers drawn from the panels that I attended, many others also demonstrated that Africanist art historians have taken seriously the need to look at African art in specific historical contexts; up to and including the present.

The St. Thomas Triennial supported the view held by many in our field that the term "traditional" is outmoded and no longer useful in describing African art as we now understand it. "Traditional" art is not something that was ever static and unchanging. It is not something that was made then, as opposed to "contemporary" art that is being made now. Many of the most revered images of "traditional" African art were once newly introduced forms or alterations of previous ones, and many of today's innovations will eventually appear conservative, standard, or even old-fashioned. Perhaps it is time we dropped "traditional" from our vocabulary. But what can we use to replace it? Alternatives such as "classical" and "canonical" have many of the same shortcomings as "traditional," and "precolonial" doesn't convey the perpetuation of many art forms throughout and long after the colonial period. Similar debates once circulated around the word "primitive," and as was the case then, I'm certain that the discussion of "traditional" will not only help us clarify our thinking but lead to new terminology that better reflects the current state of the field.

I would like to end by mentioning two papers that I found particularly enjoyable. Carol Magee's presentation of "Forever in Kente: Cultural Imperialism and Mattel's Ghanaian Barbie" was appropriately breezy and amusing, but the content was serious and thought-provoking. When compared to other Barbies, the kente-clad doll was shown to be a grab bag of Western stereotypes about Africa, being timeless and unchanging (she's literally unable to change her outfit or her hair) and lacking individual identity and agency. What better way to hit home the pervasiveness of these attitudes than in an icon of American popular culture?

A paper that made me confront some of my own biases in African art was David Doris's mysteriously titled "Vigilant Things: The Strange Fates of Ordinary Objects in Southwestern Nigeria." It focused on aale, Yoruba sculptural constructs made of discarded utilitarian objects that are intended to protect personal property and deter thieves (an example is shown on page 10 of A History of Art in Africa, Visona et al., 2001). While these objects are seemingly simple in construction and unimposing in materials, Doris illuminated the many rich layers of meaning they encode. When later I found myself wondering why he hadn't applied his obvious skill in verbal and visual analysis to more elaborate and intentionally artistic forms, like sculpture, I realized I had walked right into the age-old art/artifact trap.

These papers, and many others, reassured me that studies of the "traditional" (or whatever term we eventually find to replace this outdated one) arts of Africa are alive and well. They are just different than they were when I first started attending the Triennial, and that's what will keep me coming back for more.

KATE EZRA teaches African art history at Columbia College in Chicago, and is a consulting editor of African Arts.