Western Frontiers of African Art navigates the problems and prospects of prometheusis in creative cultural productions. Artists, writers, musicians, and other creative practitioners share
icons, ideas, images, and paraphernalia across cultures, mediums, and disciplines in many ways including borrowing, copying, adoption, adaptation, abbreviation, distortion, and even outright
pilfering. Their reasons for sharing creative elements range from admiration to subversion, pedagogical innovation, criticism, hegemony, revenge, anger, fear, malice, and even pathology. Once
shared these artistic materials become links and crossroads that complicate creativity and culture with prometheusis. But what is prometheusis? How does it work and how is it evaluated? Drawing
on the visual arts, this book elaborates on prometheusis as a general theory of cultural exchange, productivity, and analysis. Examples focus on the intersections and frontiers of western
modernity and African art. Moyo Okediji is Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas, Austin, and the author of several books on African art.
