Z. S. Strother
Arts of Africa
Ph.D., Yale University
Biography
Zoë Strother is the Riggio Professor of African Art at Columbia University. She is a student of Central and West African art history, with a focus on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She has published books and essays on Congolese art history, on masks and masquerade, on photography, on the history of iconoclasms in Africa, and restitution. She has also studied European “primitivism” through projects addressing Sara Baartman (the “Hottentot Venus”), Carl Einstein, Vladimir Markov, Leni Riefenstahl, and the modernist assertion that “A Photograph Steals the Soul.” Strother’s current research concentrates on aesthetic emotions in Congolese art history.
Awards
Professor Strother has received numerous distinctions, including fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art (CASVA), Getty Research Institute, Michigan Society of Fellows, Belgian-American Educational Foundation, U.S. Information Agency (Fulbright).
Conference Co-Organizer
Books
African Masks and Emotions: In Theory and In Practice. Getty Research Institute, 2026. Available as a paperback and as a free PDF download.
Humor and Violence: Seeing Europeans in Central African Art, 1850-1997. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016.
Honorable Mention, African Studies Association’s 2017 Melville J. Herskovits Prize “for the best scholarly work on Africa published in English" in 2016.
Vladimir Markov and Russian Primitivism: A Charter for the Avant-Garde (with Jeremy Howard and Irēna Bužinska). Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015.
Pende. Milan: 5 Continents Editions, 2008.
Inventing Masks: Agency and History in the Art of the Central Pende. University of Chicago Press, 1998. [Paper 1999.]
Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publication Award from the Arts Council of the African Studies Association for “original scholarship and excellence that makes significant contributions to our understanding of African and African Diasporic arts,” 1998-2000.
Selected Articles
“Dancing with Smoke: Géraldine Tobe in Conversation with Z. S. Strother and Toma Muteba Luntumbue,” African Arts 58: 3 (Autumn 2025), 46-59.
“Negotiating Ephemerality and Permanence in the Politics of Restitution.” In (Re)Making Collections. Origins, Trajectories, & Reconnections, ed. Sarah Van Beurden, Didier Gondola, and Agnès LaCaille. Tervuren, Belgium: Royal Museum for Central Africa, 2023, 199-215. (Published within a book of essays available for download: https://www.africamuseum.be/en/research/discover/publications/series/studies-social-sciences-humanities
Une traduction française est disponible, publiée dans un ouvrage en libre accès téléchargeable à l'adresse suivante : https://www.africamuseum.be/fr/research/discover/publications/series/studies-social-sciences-humanities
"Iconoclasms in Africa: Implications for the Debate on Restitution of Cultural Heritage." HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Vol. 10 (3) 2020: 928-952, 985-988.
“Les iconoclasmes en Afrique: emergence d’un sujet d’étude.” Perspective : actualité en histoire de l'art (Revue scientifique de l'Institut national d’histoire de l’art). Special issue: “Détruire.” 2018-2, pp. 219-246. Available for download.
Op-Ed. “Eurocentrism still sets the terms of restitution of African art: A selective view of cultural heritage continues the colonialist paradigm” (posted online Jan. 8, 2019).
“Breaking juju,” breaking trade: Museums and the culture of iconoclasm in southern Nigeria.” Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 67-68 (2016/2017), 21-41. (As of March 2026, listed as one of the journal’s “most read of all published articles.”)
“Kendell Geers: or, How to Philosophise with a Hammer.” In Kendell Geers: AniMystik AKtivist Between Traditional and the Contemporary in African Art. Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2018, 44-74.
“Meteoric Realities. The Fourth Biennale of Lubumbashi.” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 41 (Nov. 2017): 176-187.
“Art with Fight in it: Discovering that a Statue of a Colonial Officer is a Power Object from the 1931 Pende Revolt” (with Herbert F. Weiss and Richard B. Woodward). African Arts 49: 1 (Spring 2016): 56-67.
“A Terrifying Mimesis: Problems of Portraiture and Representation in African Sculpture (Congo-Kinshasa).” Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 65-66 (2014/2015), 126-145.
“The Politics of Face in the African Art Photography of Vladimir Markov.” In Vladimir Markov and Russian Primitivism: A Charter for the Avant-Garde (with Jeremy Howard and Irēna Bužinska). Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015, 85-128.
“`A Photograph Steals the Soul’: The History of an Idea.” In Portraiture and Photography in Africa, ed. John Peffer and Elisabeth Cameron. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013, 177-212.
“Looking for Africa in Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik.” African Arts 46:4 (Winter 2013): 8-21. (Also published as: “À la recherche de l’Afrique dans Negerplastik de Carl Einstein,” Gradhiva n.s., 2011 no. 14, pp. 31-55, 257-59).
* The article on Einstein has been selected for free distribution and may be accessed through the MIT Press Journals website:
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/afar/46/4
"Architecture Against the State: The Virtues of Impermanence in the Kibulu of Eastern Pende Chiefs in Central Africa". Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 63: 3 (September 2004), pp.272-95.
“From Performative Utterance to Performative Object: Pende Theories of Speech, Blood Sacrifice, and Power Objects.” RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 37 (Spring 2000), pp. 49-71.
“Gabama a Gingungu and the Secret History of Twentieth-Century Art,”African Arts, 32: 1 (Spring 1999), pp. 18-31, 92-93.
"Display of the Body Hottentot". In Africans on Stage," ed. Bernth Lindfors. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999, pp. 1-61.
