Z. S. Strother

Zoë S. Strother is an art historian. She serves as Riggio Professor of African Art at Columbia University. Her work focuses on 20th and 21st-century Central and West African art history.

Zoë S. Strother
Occupation	Art historian
Title	Riggio Professor of African Art
Awards	Guggenheim Fellow (2000)
Academic background
Alma mater	Yale University
Academic work
Discipline	African Art
Institutions	Columbia University

She graduated from Yale University.^[1]

Strother was a 2000 Guggenheim Fellow.^[2] Her book Inventing Masks^[3][4][5][6] won the 2001 Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publication Award from the Arts Council of the African Studies Association.^[7] In it she describes masks as part of a larger performance and thus creative process.^[5] Against the Franz Boas vein of interpreting African art such as masks as a conservative matter of tradition, Strother’s fieldwork finds they are a site of invention and novelty, demonstrating the agency of the creators and wearers.^[5] Critics praised the book, saying the cover blurbs were “not hyperbole”.^[5]

Works

• Inventing Masks: Agency and History in the Art of the Central Pende (University of Chicago Press, 1998) ISBN 9780226777337, OCLC 41258436
• Pende (5 Continents Editions, 2008) OCLC 148864715
• Vladimir Markov and Russian Primitivism: A Charter for the Avant-Garde' with Jeremy Howard and Irēna Bužinska (Ashgate, 2015) ISBN 9781317001027, OCLC 973229740
• Humor and Violence: Seeing Europeans in Central African Art, 1850-1997 (Indiana University Press, 2016) ISBN 0253022673, OCLC 966825524

References

1. "Zoë Strother - Faculty - Department of Art History and Archaeology - Columbia University". arthistory.columbia.edu. Columbia University. Retrieved 19 April 2022.
2. "John Simon Guggenheim Foundation | Z. S. Strother". www.gf.org. John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Retrieved 2 March 2017.
3. Muller, Jean-Claude (1999). "Z.S. STROTHER, Inventing Masks. Agency and History in the Art of the Central Pende. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1998, 348 p., 8 planches couleur, photogr., bibliogr., index". Anthropologie et Sociétés (in French). 23 (3): 188–190. doi:10.7202/015626ar. ISSN 0702-8997.
4. Argenti, Nicolas (2000-03-01). "Inventing masks: agency and history in the art of the central Pende". Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 6 (1): 182.
5. Vansina, J. (September 1998). "Z.S. Strother. Inventing Masks: Agency and History in the Art of the Central Pende. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. xxvii + 348 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. $49.95. Cloth". African Studies Review. 41 (2): 178–179. doi:10.2307/524848. ISSN 0002-0206. JSTOR 524848. S2CID 146996693.
6. De Heusch, Luc (2000). "Strother, Z. S., 1998 : Inventing masks. Agency and history in the art of the Central Pende". Journal des Africanistes. 70 (1): 383–390.
7. "ACASA : Arts Council of the African Studies Association". archive.is. African Studies Association. 5 July 2008. Archived from the original on 5 July 2008. Retrieved 2 March 2017.