Ancient African art spanned from 8000 BCE to 2000 CE across the diverse continent of Africa. Key characteristics included using wood, ivory, and metal to create purposeful rather than decorative works exploring spirituality and ancestors. Major artistic periods included the Nok culture sculptures from Nigeria and Great Zimbabwe stone walls from 1100-1450 CE. Contemporary African artists borrow from traditional styles while using new mediums like painting to represent identity and change on the continent. Masks and textiles continue to be important artistic traditions exploring cultural symbols and rituals.

1. Ancient African Art (8000 BCE - 2000 CE)
By: Kavita Sinha, Jason Seidman, and Phil Hochman

2. Map of Africa
● 2nd largest, most populated
continent
● Includes 54 individual countries
● Mediterranean Sea to the north
● Suez Canal, Red Sea along the
Sinai Peninsula to the northeast
● Indian Ocean to the east and
southeast
● Atlantic Ocean to the west

3. Key Ideas
● Much African art is created around spirituality, the spirit world, and the role of ancestors
in our lives
● African artists prefer wood, but notable works are also done in ivory and metal
● African art is rarely decorative, but made for a purpose, often for ceremonies
● African architecture is predominantly made of mud-brick; stone is rare, but can be seen
in Zimbabwe and in Ethiopian churches

4. Issues Present in Art
● Family and Respect for Elders
● Believed both things were key components of life
● Many sculptures are representations of family ancestors
● sculptures carved to venerate their spirits
● Fertility of women and the land
● Highly regarded
● Spirits of the forest or those associated with natural phenomenon were respected
and worshipped
● Sculptures of suckling mothers are extremely common

5. Major Stylistic Periods
CIVILIZATION TIME PERIOD LOCATION
Nok 500 BCE - 200 CE Nigeria
Great Zimbabwe 11th - 15th centuries Zimbabwe
Ife Culture 11th - 12th centuries Nigeria
Aksum 1200 - 1527 Ethiopia
Benin 13th - 19th centuries Nigeria
Mende 19th - 20th centuries Sierra Leone
Kongo 19th - 20th centuries Congo

6. Historical Events
● 1000 - 300 BCE Phoenicians and Greeks form settlements along the
Mediterranean coast of North Africa to extend trade routes across the Sahara
● 600 - 700 CE Islamic Empire spread across North Africa and Islamic merchants
often visited, spreading Islamic culture. Gold taken from West Africa helped Islamic
culture flourish
● East Africa was part of maritime trade in the Indian Ocean. The language of
Swahili developed from interactions (conflict) with Arabic-speaking merchants. Port
cities such as Kilwa, Mombasa, and Mogadishu arose
● 1400 CE Europeans traveled down the Atlantic Ocean along the coast of Africa.
They rediscovered the continent.

7. Patronage and Artistic Life
● African objects are unsigned and undated (tradition relies on oral records of history)
● Artists worked on commission
● lived with patrons until the commission was completed
● Apprenticeship training was the standard
● Artists had guilds that promoted their work and elevated their profession
● Men were builders and carvers and could wear masks
● Women painted walls and created ceramics
● In Sierra Leone and Liberia, women wore masks during coming-of-age ceremonies
● Both were weavers
● Most collectable art originated in farming communities - bronze and wood sculpture
● Nomadic people produced more body art
● Art imported into Europe during the Renaissance more as curiosities than artistic objects
● accepted into European artistic circles in the early twentieth century

8. Architecture
● Built to be cool and comfortable
● provide relief from the hot African
weather
● Often built using mud-brick walls and thatched
roofs
● Mud-brick was easy and inexpensive to make
● Had to be carefully maintained during
rainy seasons
● Timbers were horizontally placed as
maintenance ladders
● Usually avoided stonework in architecture and
sculpture
● makes the royal complex at Zimbabwe
unique

9. Great Zimbabwe
Great Zimbabwe, fourteenth century, Zimbabwe
● Prosperous trading center and royal complex
● Stone enclosure, probably a royal residence
● said to be the capital of the Queen of Sheba
● Constructed of granite slabs
● Oldest stone monument of the Sahara
● Built between 1100 and 1450 CE
● Walls 30 feet high
● Conical tower modeled on traditional shape of grain
silos
● Control over food symbolized wealth and power
● Walls slope inward toward the top
● Provides support since no mortar was used
● Internal and external passageway are tightly bounded,
narrow, and long

10. Images of Great Zimbabwe
Arial View Internal Passageway

11. Sculpture
● Art is mostly portable - very few large sculptures
● Wood is the favored material
● Trees were honored and symbolically repaid for the branches
taken from them
● Ivory was used as a sign of rank or prestige
● Metal shows strength and durability/restricted to royalty
● Stone is extremely rare
● Figures are usually frontal
● Symmetry is used sometimes
● No preliminary sketches
● Stiffness to all works
● Heads are disproportionately large - intelligence
● Sexual characteristics are enlarged
● Bodies are immature and small, fingers are rare
● Physical reality is avoided
● Important sculpture always created for a purpose
● Nok heads were major works of African sculpture

12. Nok Head
Nok Head, 500 BCE-200 CE, terra-cotta, Nigeria
● May have been part of a full-sized figure
● Triangular eyes
● High arching eyebrows parallels sagging underside of
eyes; voids of the irises draws attention
● Mouth indicates speech; nose barely modeled - widely
spaced flaring nostrils
● Holes for airing out large ceramics during firing in eyes,
nostrils, mouth
● Human head appears cylindrical
● Each of the large buns of the hairstyle is pierced with a
hole that may have held ornamental feathers
● May represent ordinary people dressed for special
occasions, or it may portray people of high status
● Some figures had necklaces, bracelets, etc.
● Used as ancestor portrayal, grave marker, charms

13. Contemporary Art
● Pioneered in 1950s and 1960s
● Colonial period & Years after World War II
● African artists trained in the
techniques of European art
● Most contemporary works have ties to
traditional African folklore, belief systems,
and imagery
● Use of new mediums such as oils and silk
screening
● Break from the traditional wooden
masks/sculptures, cloths, and body
painting
● Contemporary artists borrow from traditional
predecessors of the Western world
● Ex. Pablo Picasso
● Julie Mehretu
Julie Mehretu
RENEGADE DELIRIUM
2002

14. Dispersion
Julie Mehretu, Dispersion, 2002
● Ink and acrylic on canvas
● Collection of Nicolas and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn
● New York
● Start seeing abstract works of African art
● Works show the transitional movement of people uprooted
by choice or force to create new identities during a time of
globalization and change
● change of African tradition
● Work has a conceptual complexity
● Suggests the difficulty of creating and negotiating a
communal space in the contemporary world
● Also suggests a new kind of space - “cyberspace”
● results in room for artistic exploration
● Rift divides the painting in half - separation of two worlds

15. Jackson Pollock
Similarities
● Western equivalent to the work of Julie Mehretu
● Nonobjective
● Abstract
● Freedom of expression
● Swooping lines
● No defined figures
Differences
● Pollock leaves no open spaces
● Does not paint over architectural plans
● No predetermined size of painting
Jackson Pollock
UNTITLED NO. 3
1948

16. Textiles
● Made from cotton, animal fibers, grass fibers
● Woven cloth made on narrow and horizontal
looms
● Motifs and patterns of cloth produced by a
variety of techniques
● resist dyeing, tie dyeing, direct painting
on the fabric
● Cloth indicates status, personal, and group
identity
● Often worn to beautify, complement, and
enhance the body
● Adire
● White cotton
● Painted with cassava starch and
dropped in indigo dye
● Areas covered in starch remain white

17. Kente Cloth
Kente Cloth, Ashanti Culture, Ghana
● 20th century
● Silk
● Weaving introduced in Ghana during the seventeenth
century
● Light, horizontal looms that produce long, narrow
strips of cloth
● Originally reserved for state regalia
● Man wore a single piece, wrapped like a toga with no
belt and the right shoulder bare
● Women wore two pieces - skirt and shawl

18. Masks
● Masks carved in wood and metal
● Costumed dancers don masks and assume the power of the
spirit it represents
● Role of the mask is never decorative, but functional and
spiritual
● Works have powers that are symbolically greater than their
visual representation
Mende Mask of Sierra Leone (Nowo), twentieth century, wood
● Female ancestor spirits
● High forehead = wisdom
● Used for initiation rites to adulthood
● Symbolic of the chrysalis of a butterfly
● Shiny black surface
● Small horizontal features
● Elaborate hairstyle decorated with combs

19. Glossary
1. Ciré perdue: the lost wax process; a bronze casting method in which a figure is modeled
in clay and covered with wax and then recovered with clay; when fired in a kiln, the wax
melts away, leaving a channel between the two layers of clay which can be used as a
mold for liquid metal
2. Fetish: an object believed to possess magical powers
3. Finials: knoblike architectural decorations usually found at the top point of a spire,
pinnacle, canopy, or gable; also found on furniture or the top of a staff
4. Jijora: the idea of floating between the concrete and the abstract; not too realistic
5. Kente: Ashanti woven textiles
6. Nowo: black masks worn by the Mende women to initiate young girls into adulthood
7. Scarification: scarring of the skin in patterns by cutting with a knife; when the cut heals,
a raised pattern is created, which is painted
8. Shaman: keeper of the power figure