African Artists under Mission Patronage

African Artists under Mission Patronage explores relationships between African artists and Western Christian missions in twentieth-century Africa, and how that patronage has shaped and defined twentieth-century African art.

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The development, promotion, and status of African art and African artists in twentieth-century Africa is linked to several stakeholders and agencies, including Western Christian missions. Fadhili Mshana, in African Artists under Mission Patronage, surveys how mission patronage of African artists influenced twentieth-century African art, presenting specific case studies of Oye-Ekiti Workshop (Nigeria), Cyrene and Serima missions (Zimbabwe), Grace Dieu and Rorke’s Drift missions (Republic of South Africa), Kungoni Center of Culture and Art (Malawi), Nyumba ya Sanaa/NYS or “House of Art,” Bujora Mission, the Hernnhut Brethren of Urambo Mission, the Benedictine Abbey Ndanda, and Maneromango Lutheran Mission (Tanzania). Mshana considers the philosophies and policies of these missions, their approaches in training artists, the processes of knowledge exchange surrounding art-making and attitudes toward art, the role of visual traditions, the use of art objects, the status of artists, and the socio-economic climate of the cultures hosting the missions. He concludes that the artists and the missions that supported them made significant contributions to the history of contemporary African art.