Arts of Africa

Africa is the cradle within which humans became modern. It was in Africa that our ancestors were equipped with the imagination to create and shape the world we have inherited. From this source some embarked upon a global diaspora to blaze new trails. In the twenty-first century the place with the oldest past has the world’s fastest growing, most youthful population.

Africa’s diverse cultures represent a deep history of 160,000 years of experimentation with ideas, beliefs, and forms of expression. The pace at which these changes unfolded, though comparable to other regions of the world, has been less documented by societies that favored the oral transmission of knowledge. Across this vast continent, communities of nomadic hunter-gatherers have coexisted with those of mighty states. Archaeological investigation, analysis of some three thousand languages, and the study of material vestiges preserved in museums attest to a past as dynamic as the present.

The works in these galleries relate to the myriad cultural landscapes that blossomed south of the Sahara. Among those original sites of creation are storied hubs of global and regional trade, the affluent courts of powerful monarchs, and ephemeral, transient settlements. Artists and their workshops masterfully translated and amplified distinctive worldviews into creations that have endured beyond fleeting everyday experiences or rarefied events animated by dancers and musicians. From the seventeenth century some of those traditions were given new life in the Americas. Even fully isolated from those cultural contexts, these works of daring ingenuity have since the twentieth century been catalysts for innovators, inspired by their originality and arresting visual power, to take new leaps.