Our guest on this episode is Suzanne Preston Blier, the Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

In this episode
About the AfricaMap project at Harvard, its origins and objectives (1:15) — How she researched and wrote the book Art and Risk in Ancient Yoruba: Ife History, Power and Identity, c. 1300 (10:00) — How risk and power play into the practice of pure copper life-size casting, and the trade along the Niger River (14:45) — The origins of her book The Anatomy of Architecture: Ontology and Metaphor in Batammaliba Architectural Expression (17:15) — Independent farmers in Vermont and on the Benin-Togo border (17:45) — Advice for graduate students writing up their research: “Ask yourself, what was the most shocking thing that happened to you?” (20:45) — Discovering that each of the key parts of a Batammaliba house has an anatomical reference (22:00) — What Batammaliba houses are like (22:45) — The book African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power and the origins of bocio objects in 19th-century Dahomey, in contrast to the better-publicized royal arts there (27:00) — The slave trade and the arrival of the French in Dahomey (29:00) — How Joseph Leo Koerner’s Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art inspired the structure of the book (30:45) — Is Picasso doing cultural appropriation? (32:00) — The Demoiselles and complex symbolizations of global womanhood (34:45) — African art at Harvard: the institutional situation (38:00)