Collaborative Migrations:Contemporary Art in /as Anthropology by Steven Feld with Virginia Ryan Pages 109-125/Making Art Ethnography:Painting,War and Ethnographic Practice by Susan Ossman

This chapter is in response to Arnd Schneider's concerns over anthropology not including visuals and not engaging "a narrative textural paradigm with visual working the contemporary arts"page 109. So here three experiments in collaborative form are discussed.Virginia Ryan is the visual artist who invited  anthropologist and sound artist Steven Feld to collaborate with her through written acoustic  and visual media and each project relates and addresses these issues.This article goes on to discuss the collaborative process involved.For example 2001-5 Virginia Ryan staged many photographs like hundreds of  herself in different situations in Ghana and areas around Ghana where she was actually living and working as an artist.Ryan and Feld chose some 60 photos with a discussion of why these photos were so important as artistic and anthropological viewpoints.For example, one photo is of a white woman sleeping and a black nurse sitting by her side. called "Malaria Attack". Another one is of a white woman dressed and laying in the same position as a black woman called "Castaways".

Making Art Ethnography:Painting,War and Ethnographic Practice by Susan Ossman 127-163 ends this book with a discussion and examples of how visual anthropology has actually aided anthropologists to"develop a keener eye"p.127
Anthropologists are now able to use sound,photography,film and video as a part of their process of research and as a manner to present their research which allow a new audience to view research findings and is actually more sensitive to how the people studied are presented.So we see that music and even poetry and theater of anthropologists has been used during research and findings presented but guess what???Painting has really been overlooked. Susan Ossman discusses here, the importance painting can be to fieldwork and that she argues that really painting is a "pertinent aspect of fieldwork"page 127.She painted a triptych in "Casablanca" in 1990 that was actually inspired by a trip she made to Morocco and she says, albeit not realistic, it does portray the  region nicely and ties the landscape with woven colors and paint just as the women of Jebel area wear woven colors of white and red in their clothing when they work..so "Tables and Tabliers", a painting she did in 1991  , she says placed focus on the domestic work of these women,so she says she bought red and white aprons from the women and one of their work tables and made a painting  about it it..However I see a major problem in that when looking at the paintings, one does not get any of that which the artists is saying so I think it falls apart as anthropology.You would have to read the artists words to know what she was doing.She goes on to describe her next projects which actually involve weaving red lines and she continues to push the limitations of this idea of red and white lines.but I feel her paintings do not convey what her words do...she concludes that a sketch or painting is like a field note...page 134...."it can focus attention on certain objects,regularities or connections.once it is hung in public,it can stimulate exchanges about aesthetics or politics."

I must say that these ideas resonate with me and especially with the art project I plan to do  about the lynching of Leo Frank and lynchings of black people in the south.I believe I am taking this idea of combining anthropology and visual art further than discussed here by incorporating actual rope and other raw materials into this piece.