Contributions
Price’s early work, which focused on the Maroons of Suriname, included Co-Wives and Calabashes, “an analysis of the ways that cultural ideas about the genders influence Saramaka women’s art and artistic activity and the complementary contributions that these artistic activities make to their social life,” which won the University of Michigan’s Alice and Edith Hamilton Prize in Women’s Studies. Later, inspired by her experiences as a guest curator of Maroon art for a UCLA-based traveling exhibition, she began exploring Western constructions of non-Western art. Her Primitive Art in Civilized Places (published in English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese) has sparked much debate, “rattling glass cases throughout the art world,” as one critic put it. In her role as a Caribbeanist, she co-edited (with Sidney W. Mintz) Caribbean Contours (dubbed “the best single book available today for courses on Caribbean society and politics”) and together with Richard Price, she has written books on a variety of subjects, from artist Romare Bearden’s life in the Caribbean to Maroon arts, folktale traditions, public folklore, the history of anthropology, art forgery, and artifact collecting (this last illustrated by Sally Price with 50 pen-and-ink sketches). Her recent work has been based in two distant parts of France--French Guiana, where she continues her ethnographic studies of Maroon culture, and Paris, where she has written on the politics, both personal and national, involved in the creation of Paris’s new museum of African, Asian, Oceanic, and Pre-Columbian art.
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