Between 1979 and 1994, Margaret Courtney-Clarke travelled through Southern, Western and Northern Africa, recording the artistic traditions of rural women. The Art of African Women brings together the results of that fifteen-year undertaking: photographs accompanied by sketches and written observations. Its subject is not art isolated from daily life, but creative practice understood through the women, communities and social conditions in which it took form.

The book revisits three projects first published separately between 1986 and 1996: Ndebele, African Canvas and Imazighen. Courtney-Clarke has reedited this material, while the publication has been redesigned to present the bodies of work together. Seen in this expanded context, the photographs register both the variety of women’s artistic traditions across distinct regions and the pressures surrounding identities shaped by inherited customs and colonization.

A fourth section broadens the photographic account through writings by Maya Angelou, Geraldine Brooks, David Goldblatt and Sean O’Toole. Their perspectives range across history, politics, sociology, anthropology and art history. Pages from Courtney-Clarke’s travel journals, book layouts and snapshots add another register, exposing elements of observation, selection and construction behind the finished projects rather than treating the photographs as self-contained documents.

Published by Steidl as a 392-page paperback, this is substantial not simply in scale but in editorial structure. For a serious photobook collection, its significance rests on the opportunity to consider three related works in a newly edited framework, alongside the working material and commentary that complicate their reading. It is at once a sustained record of women’s art-making and a study of how a long-term photographic project can be reconsidered through republication, juxtaposition and design.