by Jon Lackman | 20 April 2010 | Africa
A recent issue of African Arts (Winter 2009) carries an obituary of Rosalinde Gregor Wilcox, a scholar of African art who earned her PhD from UCLA in 1994, at the age of 58, after studying with Arnold Rubin, Herbert Cole, and Doran Ross:
She was critically aware but cautious in her writing. The canoe prows of the Cameroon coastal communities exercised her intellectual horizons, over and over again. In an African Arts essay she examined the transregional importance of the canoe for commerce and communication, drawing on the history and aesthetics of the prows as a metaphor for movement and contact … Rosalinde was cryptic and very succinct [in conversation] … ‘Earnest, as impure as the driven snow’ … ‘He’s a nice fellow, with limiting reservations.’
