UNC-Chapel Hill has joined a consortium of universities who will share editorial oversight and financial support for African Arts, the oldest continuously publishing journal in the field of African art history.
African Arts is a quarterly journal published by the UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center. UCLA will partner with UNC-Chapel Hill, the University of Florida and, in 2017, Rhodes University of South Africa to produce the journal.
The editorial team at UNC-Chapel Hill will consist of Carol Magee, David G. Pier and Victoria L. Rovine — along with Lisa Homann at UNC-Charlotte.
Consortium institutions will contribute to production and staffing costs of the journal. At UNC, that will include the department of art; department of African, African-American and diaspora studies; the African Studies Center; the Center for Global Initiatives; the College of Arts and Sciences’ Dean’s Office; the Global Education Fund and the Institute for the Arts and the Humanities.
Each team will be responsible for the feature articles and “First Word” opinion column for one issue per year, while departmental and reviews columns will continue to be the responsibility of editors appointed by the consortium as a whole.
African Arts was founded at UCLA in 1967 as “a quarterly magazine devoted to the graphic, plastic, performing and literary arts of Africa, traditional and contemporary,” with an intended audience of academics, art collectors and general interest readers. Over the decades, it has evolved into an academic journal focused on the visual cultures of Africa, featuring abundant full-color illustration and cutting-edge scholarship. It is the only journal to encompass both traditional and contemporary African art genres in media ranging from wood to Wi-Fi.
