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| Traditional
and Contemporary African Art |
| African art does
not simply beautify the environment, but transmits
laws, moral codes, and history; communicates between
people and the spirit world; and signifies wealth
and status. It encompasses all of life—birth,
initiation, work, marriage, childbirth, death,
and afterlife. The art is expressed through architectural
elements like doors, baskets, costumes and textiles,
furniture and furnishings, jewelry and beadwork,
graphic arts, masks,
pottery,
musical
instruments, sculpture (metal, stone, terracotta,
wood), tools and equipment, toys and entertainment,
and weapons and armaments. The shaman-artists
who carved masks and sculpted figures believed
that these objects were crucibles for spirit forces
with the power to alter the world and, thus, could
absorb negative forces. This spiritual connection
allowed a tribal dancer who put a mask over his
face to acquire a new identity and enter into
the spirit world. African masks and sculpted figures
with their grotesquely distorted facial features
that ignored Western conventions of perspective
and symmetry had a profound influence on Picasso,
Matisse, Braque, and other modernist artists who
in turn transformed Western art. The masks that
hang on museum walls are detached from the full
costume, music, and dance so that the fear and
beauty captured by a live
masquerade is lost. Sokari
Douglas Camp (b. 1958) uses her sculpture
to capture the full performance of the Kalabari
and Yoruba masquerades. Cattle, crops, ivory,
iron, salt, and gold led to the development of
administrative, commercial, and artistic centers
like Aksum
in Ethiopia, inland
Niger delta of Mali (Jenne-jeno and Timbuktu),
mediokari Douglas Campeval empires of the western
Sudan (Ghana,
Mali,
Songhai),
Guinea
Coast of Nigeria (Benin Kingdom, Ife,
Igbo-Ukwu),
Limpopo River Valley (Mapungubwe
and Bambandyanalo), and Great
Zimbabwe. Ancient traditions like the stone
carvings of birds at Great Zimbabwe inspired Zimbabwean
stone sculpture, which emerged in the early
1960's through the work of Joram Mariga (1927-2000) and Frank McEwen (1908-1994). African art has also been
used as a political
tool during struggles for liberation, in support
of apartheid, and for chronicling the despair of blacks in South
Africa. In the past 15 years, African art
has gone from modernism to postmodernism, from
abstraction to figuration, and it is moving again
in a new direction where video, sound, and performance
are incorporated into painting, printing, and
sculpture as artists delve into the meaning of
who and what they are. African art museums are
no longer just repositories of ethnographic materials.
Today, they are expanding into contemporary
African art with the works of William
Kentridge (b. 1955), Ezrom
Legae (1938-1999), Magdalene
Odundo (b. 1950), and others. For more information
on African art, see Africa: The Art of a Continent, African
Art: Aethetics and Meaning, African
Art on the Internet, African
Voices, African
Colours, Afrika
Museum, Art
and Life in Africa, Art
of Africa, ArtThrob,
Axis
Gallery, British
Museum, Brooklyn
Museum of Art, Fine
Arts Museums of San Francisco, Metropolitan
Museum of Art, Musée
de l'Homme, musée
du quai Branly, Museum
for African Art, Museum
für Völkerkunde, PELMAMA,
Pitt
Rivers Museum, Royal Museum for Central Africa, Seattle
Art Museum, Smithsonian
National Museum of African Art, South
African National Gallery, Tamarin, UCLA
Fowler Museum, and Virtual
Museum. |
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