Pende (Visions of Africa)
Z. S. Strother is Riggio Professor of African art at Columbia University in the City of New York. She was trained in art history at Yale University, where she received her Ph.D in 1992. Since then, she has published extensively on African visual culture, including Inventing Masks: Agency and History in the Art of the Central Pende (University of Chicago Press, 1998), which received the the Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publication Award for Original scholarship published between 1998-2000. This research is based on 32 months of fieldwork among the Eastern and Central Pende, 1987-89. Her current research focuses on untangling the history of iconoclasm in Africa.