Paper short abstract:

Making art is a 'do-it-yourself' process, and artists begin by looking at what other artists do, beginning with the 'schemata of tradition' (Gombrich) and the 'debris of events' (Levi-Strauss).

Paper long abstract:

John Picton, Emeritus Professor of African Art, was appointed to the Africa Department at SOAS in 1979 to develop the teaching of African art. But he was not appointed as an anthropologist: the university classified him as an art historian! Previously, he had worked for nine years in the Nigerian Government Department of Antiquities, followed by another nine in the British Museum. His publications address Yoruba and Edo (Benin) sculpture; masquerade; textile history; the Niger-Benue confluence region, especially Ebira; and developments in sub-Saharan visual practice since the mid-19th century. He arrived in Nigeria in June 1961, within the first year of Independence, as curator of the Lagos museum, with its unrivalled collections, also encountering lively masquerade practices on Lagos Island and the works of artists forging a new Nigerian Modernism. Thinking of art as bricolage gets us away from rigid categorizations, whether ethnic, temporal or disciplinary, so we can see just what artists do.