Sally Price

Background

Sally Price has conducted long-term research on the Maroons (descendants of runaway slaves) of Suriname, as well as briefer fieldwork in Martinique, Spain, Mexico, and French Guiana. Her books include Primitive Art in Civilized Places (now published in seven languages) and Co-Wives and Calabashes (winner of the Hamilton Prize in Women's Studies). She has also co-authored books with Richard Price -- most recently Equatoria,On The Mall, Enigma Variations, Maroon Arts, Les Marrons, and The Root of Roots: Or, How Afro-American Anthropology Got Its Start. Her more general interest in the cultures of the Caribbean is reflected in Caribbean Contours (edited with S. W. Mintz). Building on curatorial skills first developed in connection with"Afro-American Arts of the Suriname Rain Forest" (1980-1982), she has led class projects to design a number of exhibits now on view in the William & Mary Anthropology Department. During the spring 1998 semester, she took a Fulbright grant in Brazil and taught a course on art and gender at the Federal University of Bahia. Romare Bearden: The Caribbean Dimension, by Sally Price and Richard Price, will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in spring 2006.

In addition to William & Mary, Sally Price has taught at Stanford, Princeton, the University of Minnesota, the Federal University of Bahia (Brazil), and the Sorbonne in Paris. She has written extensively on aspects of African Diaspora cultures, from Harlem and the U.S. South to the Amazonian rain forest, and co-edited Caribbean Contours with Sidney Mintz. But she is best known for two critical studies of the place of “primitive art” in the imaginaire of Western viewers: Primitive Art in Civilized Places (published in eight languages) and Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly. In Holland, she is an elected member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences; in France, she is a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.