Traditional African Art

About

The label gathers sculpture, masks, textiles, regalia and everyday objects made across sub-Saharan Africa for use within communities. It spans well over two thousand years: terracotta heads of the Nok culture of central Nigeria date from the 1st millennium BC, the naturalistic heads of Ife in brass and terracotta from around the 12th to 15th centuries, and the soapstone birds of Great Zimbabwe from roughly the same era.

Most surviving wooden works are from the 19th and 20th centuries, since wood decays quickly. They were made to act: to guard ancestral relics, as with the reliquary figures of the Fang of Gabon; to embody spirits in masquerade, like the antelope headdresses of the Bamana of Mali; and to display authority through stools, staffs and beaded crowns. A mask on a stand is only a fragment of a performance that joined costume, music and movement. Some carvers, such as the Yoruba sculptor Olowe of Ise, are now well documented.