Carving Wood, Making History: The Fakeye Family, Modernity and Yorùbá  Woodcarving is the most comprehensive work on the Yorùbá  woodcarving tradition best represented by the works of the Fakeye family of Ìlá-Òràngún, northeast Yorùbáland. The research combines an enormous amount of ethnographic data with images to trace the major phases in the history of woodcarving since the nineteenth century. The study highlights the history and contributions of the most successful family of carvers, considers the issues of tradition, modernity, and continuity as well as the import and impact of colonial and postcolonial experiences in the repertoire of Yorùbá carvers. The book presents rich biographical data on individual Yorùbá artists, and utilizes this to foreground areas of confluences and disjuncture between the oeuvres of the artists of the past and those of the new era. The analysis interrogates discourses on a set of conflicting but complementary forces: continuity and change; past and present; tradition and modernity; primordial and civic, all of which locate Yorùbá woodcarving in the entire assemblage of African arts and connect it to bigger questions in art history, African philosophy and history.
 
"Dr. Adesanya has given us the best book to date on Yorùbá woodcarving. She sets the study within a larger cultural context, blending tradition with modernity, modernization with national renewal, and urbanization with globalization. The wealth of information yields fresh insights and unique orality, complemented with remarkable images, all encompassed within a conceptual framework based on meticulous research, a passion for the subject, and mastery of knowledge on both the Yorùbá and their distinguished carvers."
—Toyin Falola, University Distinguished Teaching Professor and the Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor, University of Texas at Austin