December auction of African and Oceanic art.
Striking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths, an international traveling exhibition that combines scholarship with objects of great aesthetic beauty to create the most comprehensive treatment of the blacksmith’s art in Africa to date. The exhibition will include over 225 artworks from across the African continent, focusing on the region south of the Sahara and covering a time period spanning early archaeological evidence to the present day. It features wood sculptures studded with iron, blades, and currencies in a myriad of shapes and sizes, diverse musical instruments, body adornments, an array of ritual accoutrements, tools and weapons, and other important objects that enabled Africans to forage and hunt, till the soil, and assure their own protection and prosperity. The exhibition will examine how the smith’s virtuosic works can harness the powers of the natural and spiritual world, effect change and ensure protection, prestige, and status, assist with life’s challenges and transitions, and enhance the efficacies of sacred acts such as ancestor veneration, healing, fertility, and prophecy.
Swahili coast artworks have been shaped by complex migrations across great distances, the formation of new empires, and the making and unmaking of communities and social identities. World on the Horizon explores Swahili arts as objects of mobility, outcomes of encounter, and as products of trade and imperialism. Works from different regions and time periods come together in this exhibition to reveal the movement of artistic forms, motifs, and preferences, and to reflect the changing meanings they may carry during the course of their life histories.
Through more than 350 pieces selected for their historical, aesthetic and ethnological interest, placed in their context, from ancient times to the contemporary period, the exhibition presents Malagasy art, history and culture. While they are often unknown, this exhibition aims to re-discover them through works and documents, old and contemporary, divided into three large sections.
At MEG each exhibition is the promise of a trip. From May 18th, stopover in Africa, to discover the religious cultures of this continent. The exhibition 'Africa. The religions of ecstasy' reveals the richness of African religious practices. Throughout the journey, the public plunges into an atmosphere of mysticism and discovers the fervour of believers. More than 400 unpublished pieces from the MEG's collections are enriched by fascinating images of five internationally renowned contemporary photographers. The route of the exhibition reveals monotheistic religions (Islam, Christianity and Judaism), indigenous African religions, possession cults and magico-religious universes. Here, Africa is not seen as a geographical space, but as a cultural space. These religious practices are found even in the Americas and Europe, where they have been widely disseminated by the diaspora.
This year the Wallace Collection opens its new £1.2 million exhibition space with Sir Richard Wallace: The Collector, an exhibition celebrating 200 years since the birth of the museum’s founder, Sir Richard Wallace. The exhibition explores the man, his life and his unprecedented contribution to the nation’s cultural heritage. A major international philanthropist and cultural luminary of his time, yet also an enigmatic and private individual, Sir Richard believed in sharing his inheritance with a wider audience. He was also a prominent collector, adding extensively to the Collection prior to his death in 1890. Featuring twenty works of art collected by Sir Richard, the exhibition explores his eclectic tastes and highlights some of the unexpected treasures of the museum, including a gold trophy head from the Asante Kingdom.
This exhibition of dazzling Kuba textiles presented in the BMA’s Cone Collection galleries reveals how a central African kingdom independently developed a form of modernist abstraction in the 20th century. The Kuba kingdom, on the southern edge of the Congolese Rainforest in central Africa, developed one of the greatest civilizations in the history of the continent. Art and design were central to their life. In addition to an elaborate and varied masquerade tradition, Kuba men and women were prolific textile artists, even weaving houses and embroidering currency. As the kingdom grew richer and more powerful, Kuba men and women began to create increasingly abstract designs. Works produced in Kuba’s earlier periods are defined by repeating patterns and minute details. Textiles created at the height of the kingdom’s power and prestige are characterized by bold, inventive designs that are constantly in flux. The BMA is proud to partner with the Historic Textile Research Foundation on this groundbreaking exhibition.
Congo Stars shows Congolese popular paintings from the 1960s to the present day as well as Congolese contemporary art, also from artists now living in Paris and Brussels, with loans from the MRCA in Tervuren, the Iwalewahaus in Bayreuth, private collectors and from Austrian collections such as the Sammlung Armin Prinz der Österreichischen Ethnomedizinischen Gesellschaft, Sammlung Horvath Politischer Kunst, Weltmuseum Wien, Sammlung Peter Weihs et al..
Brafa is one of the leading European art and antiques fairs. Here, all art works on show are for sale and quality and authenticity are two of the key requirements exhibitors face. Brafa is an eclectic fair which encompasses a variety of specialities, from antiquity to the 21st century, including archaeology, Oceanic art, African art...
World on the Horizon explores Swahili arts as objects of mobility, outcomes of encounter, and as products of trade and imperialism. Works from different regions and time periods come together in this exhibition to reveal the movement of artistic forms, motifs, and preferences, and to reflect the changing meanings they may carry during the course of their life histories.
This innovative and visually compelling exhibition presents more than 130 masks from the vast Congo region of Africa. Drawn from the finest and most comprehensive collection in private hands, these masks from the 19th and 20th centuries are combined with film footage, photographs, instruments, maps, and music to evoke the sights and sounds of the Congo.
1-54 Marrakech 2018 welcomed 4,000 local and international visitors, 17 leading galleries from Africa and around the world, with over 50 international artists. 1-54 presented special projects in partnership with Musée d’Art Contemporain Africain Al Madeen (MACAAL), Musée Yves Saint-Laurent Marrakech and Fondation Montresso*, as well as a wider programme of events in partnership with other local institutions across the city, including Comptoir des Mines Galerie, LE 18 and Riad Yima, among others. 1-54 Marrakech returns between the 23 -24 February 2019 at La Mamounia.
The exhibition ‘Beyond Compare’ introduces superlative works of art from Africa from the Ethnologisches Museum into the peerless sculpture collection of the Bode Museum. Pairs of sculptures from both continents will be placed throughout the permanent collection and a special-exhibition gallery will address specific themes. The experimental juxtaposition of works from two continents reveals possible correlations on various levels, including historic contemporaneity, iconographic and technological similarities, and artistic strategies. Despite stylistic differences, striking similarities appear in the ways works of art function in both contexts. Power figures from the Congo were used to protect villages and communities, just as Gothic depictions of the Virgin of Mercy were. At the same time comparisons also expose contrasts, as with depictions of motherhood, which rely on different visual languages in Africa and Europe and convey different messages.
From November 21, 2018, the Musée Barbier-Mueller will present an exhibition focused on asen, iron altars specifically those of the former kingdom of Dahomey. It will explore an array of issues important to our understanding of these striking sculptures. Key among these are artist hands, questions of use, the history of these arts, and how asen enhance our understanding of the broader regional history of the southern area of the Republic of Benin where they are found.
Beauty stops us in our tracks. It makes us pause, look, consider. Sometimes it overwhelms us. We are often told art should aspire to this standard and be proportionate, symmetrical, naturalistic, and orderly. But what of work that is designed to revolt and terrify? Across Sub-Saharan Africa, artists working across a range of states, societies, and cultures deliberately created artwork that violated conceptions of beauty, symmetry, and grace—both ours and theirs. Subverting Beauty features approximately two dozen works from sub-Saharan African’s colonial period (c.1880-c. 1960) that are accumulative, composite, crude, counterintuitive, and disproportionate. More importantly still, it explores the reasons why artists working during this turbulent period in the continent’s history turned against beauty in order to express the meaning and vitality of their day-to-day existence.
The Snite Museum of Art African art collection will reopen this fall within a larger, more prestigious space on the main floor of the Museum. The reinstallation will explore themes of power. In the past, African art was often tied into the way African leaders promoted their agendas. Royalty and rulers used art to project their authority; religious groups promoted their faiths; while the wealthy desired to display their riches. Ordinary Africans also used art to enable them to wield their own forms of power. Since supernatural forces were thought to play a large role in determining events, it was important to own objects that could withstand or shape events that lay beyond ordinary control. Fifty-nine outstanding works from the Snite Museum collection will illustrate these ideas through themes of economic, political, social, and spiritual power in Africa. Most of these works have never been on public view before. Nearly a third belong to the Owen D. Mort Jr. Collection, with art primarily from Democratic Republic of Congo, where Mort worked for many years. As he said, “My hope is to educate people on Africa. It’s been a great love of mine… Ideally Notre Dame would use the collection for education, to get interest going in Africa.”
Connecting African art collectors with dealers and scholars, based on a foundation of knowledge about the origin, use & distinguishing features of listed pieces
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