Raymond Silverman

Silverman’s research and writing deal with the visual traditions of Ethiopia and Ghana, and recently with museum and heritage discourse in Africa. His work over the last twenty years has focused on the visual culture of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Book-length publications include Ethiopia: Traditions of Creativity (University of Washington Press, 1999) and Painting Ethiopia: The Life and Work of Qes Adamu Tesfaw (Fowler Museum, UCLA, 2005). He is currently working on a monograph titled Icons of Devotion/Icons of Trade: Contemporary Painting and the Orthodox Church in Ethiopia. Silverman is also now working in the field of museum and heritage studies, exploring “museum culture” in Africa, specifically how local knowledge is translated in national and community-based cultural institutions. He recently edited a collection of essays on this theme, Museum as Process: Translating Local and Global Knowledges (Routledge, 2015).

Affiliation(s)

• Department of Afroamerican and African Studies

Field(s) of Study

• Visual cultures of Africa, museum studies