Archive

 

A Rich History

The Africa Center is built on the extraordinary legacy of the Museum for African Art. Founded in 1984, the Museum for African Art organized nearly 70 exhibitions of historical and contemporary art from Africa and its Diaspora in 140 venues spread across 80 cities, 17 countries and 4 continents. 

Discover the museum’s past exhibitions and explore this rich history by clicking on the book covers below.

Ibrahim El-Salahi: A Visionary Modernist

 

Ibrahim El-Salahi: A Visionary Modernist chronicles the evolution of Sudanese artist Ibrahim El-Salahi’s work over more than fifty years of sustained artistic productivity and intellectual engagement.

Jane Alexander: Surveys (from the Cape of Good Hope)

 

Jane Alexander: Surveys (from the Cape of Good Hope) presents the work of one of the most significant South African artists today–whose hybrid mutants speak to the porous borders between humans and other forms of animal life.

El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa

 

When I Last Wrote to You about Africa brings together the full range of El Anatsui’s work from wood trays and early ceramics, through chainsaw-carved wood, to his most recent luminous metal sculptures and wall hangings.

The Beautiful Time: Photography by Sammy Baloji

 

The Beautiful Time presents recent photographs and large-scale photomontages by Sammy Baloji.

Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art in Ancient Nigeria

 

Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art in Ancient Nigeria presents a major part of the extraordinary corpus of ancient Ife art in terra-cotta, stone, and metal, dating from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries.

Dinastía y Divinidad: Arte Ife en la Antigua Nigeria

 

En español: Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art in Ancient Nigeria presents a major part of the extraordinary corpus of ancient Ife art in terra-cotta, stone, and metal, dating from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries.

Desert Jewels: North African Jewelry and Photography from the Xavier Guerrand-Hermes Collection

 

Desert Jewels presents a superb collection of jewelry and late 19th- and early 20th-century photographs of North African landscapes, urban scenes, and portraits.

Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art

 

Through the prism of America’s most enduring African-inspired art form, the Lowcountry basket, Grass Roots guides readers across 300 years of American and African history.

Resonance from the Past: African Sculpture from the New Orleans Museum of Art

 

Resonance from the Past: African Sculpture from the New Orleans Museum of Art features approximately 100 works of art from the New Orleans Museum of Art, including masks and figures, musical instruments, ceramics, and fabric and beadwork costumes chosen from the extensive African art collection of the museum for their exceptional range of style and quality.

Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art, Volume I

 

Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art presents newly commissioned and recently produced art by 17 South African artists working in diverse media.

Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art, Volume II

 

Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art presents newly commissioned and recently produced art by 17 South African artists working in diverse media.

Where Gods and Mortals Meet: Continuity and Renewal in Urhobo Art

 

The first major catalogue devoted to the art and culture of the Urhobo people of the Niger River Delta in Nigeria.

Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora

 

Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora features artists who were born in Africa and now live and work in Western countries including France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the United States.

Material Differences: Art and Identity in Africa

 

Material Differences: Art and Identity in Africa reveals the traditions, rituals, and spiritual powers intrinsic to the materials used to create works of art in Africa.

Facing the Mask

 

Facing the Mask uses the mask, a central element for many African societies, as a marvelous point of entry into the arts, diverse cultures, and richly varied traditions of Africa.

Bamana: The Art of Existence in Mali

 

Bamana: The Art of Existence in Mali provides a comprehensive study of Bamana philosophy and ethics.

Bamana: Afrikanische Kunst aus Mali

 

Auf Deutch: Bamana: The Art of Existence in Mali provides a comprehensive study of Bamana philosophy and ethics.

African Forms (Addendum)

 

African Forms elevates objects of daily use such as pottery, textiles, furniture, jewelry, and weapons to genuine works of art, concentrating on non-figural utilitarian objects.

In the Presence of Spirits: Selections from the National Museum of Ethnology, Lisbon

 

In the Presence of Spirits: African Art from the National Museum of Ethnology, Lisbon  presents approximately 120 pieces from Western, Central, and Southern Africa, with emphasis upon those from Guinea Bissau and Angola, both former Portuguese colonies, many rarely seen before in the U.S.

Na Presença dos Espíritos: Arte Africana do Museu Nacional de Etnologia, Lisboa

 

Em Português: In the Presence of Spirits: African Art from the National Museum of Ethnology, Lisbon  presents approximately 120 pieces from Western, Central, and Southern Africa, with emphasis upon those from Guinea Bissau and Angola, both former Portuguese colonies, many rarely seen before in the U.S.

Hair in African Art and Culture

 

Hair in African Art and Culture features artwork ranging from masks and figures, combs, hairpins, beads, headrests to contemporary African barbershop signs that illustrate the significance of hair among various African cultures as an indicator of social status and religious function, a symbol of age and authority, a traditional aesthetic element or a statement of contemporary style, a substance with supernatural power and spiritual import, and an object of beauty and adornment.

Liberated Voices: Contemporary Art from South Africa

 

This exhibition catalogue gives insight into a unique period of transition in today’s South Africa through the examination of its contemporary art.

A Congo Chronicle: Patrice Lumumba in Urban Art

 

A Congo Chronicle: Patrice Lumumba in Urban Art presents popular paintings depicting the dramatic political career of Patrice Lumumba, the father of Congo independence who became the nation’s first Prime Minister in 1960.

African Faces, African Figures: The Arman Collection

 

African Faces, African Figures: The Arman Collection is an extraordinary collection of more than 180 visually provocative objects from diverse regions of Africa gathered over the past 40 years by world renowned French painter and sculptor Armand P. Arman.

To Cure and Protect: Sickness and Health in African Art

 

To Cure and Protect presents sculptures, masks, amulets, and other objects used as part of healing traditions in sub-Saharan Africa, both to cure disease and to prevent future affliction.

Art that Heals: The Image as Medicine in Ethiopia

 

Art That Heals: The Image as Medicine in Ethiopia examines Ethiopia’s boldly graphic, medicinal healing scrolls. Whereas Westerners have long considered art and medicine as separate realms, Ethiopians consider them to be intimately and inextricably connected.

Art of the Baga: A Drama of Cultural Reinvention

 

Art of the Baga: A Drama of Cultural Reinvention traces the art and cultural history of the Baga people from their legendary flight from the highlands of the interior of Guinea to the coast, in their attempt to conserve their own religious ritual, to the eventual destruction of their traditions at mid-century with the conversion to Islam and, with independence from France, the establishment of the Republic of Guinea under an iconoclastic Marxist regime.

Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History

 

Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History is a study of Luba art, well known for its astounding beauty, but here for the first time examined for its intellectual complexity, aesthetic impact, and social contexts.

Animals in African Art: From the Familiar to the marvelous

 

Animals in African Art: From the Familiar to the Marvelous is the first major book wholly dedicated to the animal images so common in African art. Their meanings and purposes are assumed to be so obvious that they are taken for granted.

Exhibition-ism: Museums and African Art

 

Exhibition-ism: Museums and African Art addresses issues of museum practice—what shapes our experience of art: the work itself or its setting and display? How do museums provide—or deny—access to artworks through their presentation?

Western Artist/African Art

 

African art has long been recognized as one of the most important influences on turn-of-the-century Western artists; as a new century approaches, it continues to be a major factor in contemporary art.

Fusion: West African Artists at the Venice Beinnale

 

This catalogue contributes to a new understanding of “African art,” removed definitively from the realm of the ethnographic, and firmly placed within the framework of the transcultural aesthetic.

Face of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americas

 

Face of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americas is an introduction to a brand-new field in art history: the comparative study of Afro-Atlantic altars.

Home and the World: Architectural Sculpture by Two Contemporary African Artists

 

Home and the World: Architectural Sculpture by Two Contemporary African Artists gazes at African heritage and the future through the art of contemporary artists, Aboudramane and Bodys Isek Kingelez.

Secrecy: African Art That Reveals and Conceals

 

Secrecy: African Art That Reveals and Conceals examines the relationships among art, knowledge, and secrecy in Africa.

Africa Explores: Twentieth Century African Art

 

Africa Explores: Twentieth Century African Art demonstrates the vitality of African art and culture today examining some of the major themes and artistic innovations in African art in the twentieth century. 

Closeup: Lessons in the Art of Seeing African Sculpture

 

Closeup: Lessons in the Art of Seeing African Sculpture presents African art objects of exceptional aesthetic quality from an American collection and the Horstmann collection.

Likeness and Beyond: Portraits from Africa and the World

 

Likeness and Beyond: Portraits from Africa and the World attempts to define the nature of portraiture in world art. The need to depict and commemorate individuals is as compelling a motivation for the creation of art in Africa as it is elsewhere.

Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought

 

Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought focuses on the prolific artistic expressions of the Yoruba people of western Nigeria and The People’s Republic of Benin in West Africa and the historical and cultural issues that have shaped its civilization from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries.

Wild Spirits, Strong Medicine: African Art and the Wilderness

 

Wild Spirits, Strong Medicine: African Art and the Wilderness explores African concepts of the nature/culture, wilderness/village dichotomy as it is expressed through works of art.

Africa and the Renaissance: Art in Ivory

 

Africa and the Renaissance: Art in Ivory retraces the African and European sources of ivories which were the earliest objects from sub-Saharan Africa to reach European collections.

The Art of Collecting African Art

 

The Art of Collecting African Art brings together selections of figures, masks, prestige and utilitarian objects from nine important private collections of African art providing a base for the discussion of collecting and the collectors’ personal impulses and tastes along with a bit of advice based on lessons learned from experience.

ART/Artifact: African Art in Anthropology Collections

 

ART/artifact: African Art in Anthropology Collections deals with the ways Western outsiders regard African art and material culture.

Perspectives: Angles on African Art

 

In Perspectives: Angles on African Art, ten distinguished connoisseurs explore the beauty and appeal in over one hundred African artworks of the highest aesthetic quality and tremendous ranges of styles and cultures.

African Masterpieces from Munich: The Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde

 

African Masterpieces from Munich: The Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde presents 450 selections from one of Germany’s premiere ethnographic museums whose collection of over 20,000 African objects was drawn from many sources, including the royal ethnographic collection and collections made by scientists, explorers, art lovers, and other museums.

African Aesthetics: The Carlo Monzino Collection

 

African Aesthetics: The Carlo Monzino Collection introduces the reader to African sculptures as fine examples by individual master artists, as well as a reflection of moral values. The selection of works in the book is a reassertion of the collector’s choice of pieces acquired solely on the basis of their provocative aesthetic merit.

Set, Series and Ensembles in African Art

 

Sets, Series and Ensembles in African Art presents a fundamental, but unexpected, aspect of African art—objects which were intended to be used together, emphasizing the importance of their function and meaning as part of a group.

African Masterpieces from the Musée de l’Homme

 

African Masterpieces from the Musée de l’Homme presents a selection of masterpieces from the vast ethnographic collection of France’s preeminent ethnographic museum.