"This beautifully illustrated volume highlights all the rich diversity of African cultures through a meaningful selection of masterpieces of traditional African art."--Global Books in Print.

This work displays and defines the fruits of thousands of years of black African creative endeavour. All the objects included were made by Africans for their own use, spanning a period from the beginning of the first millennium to the early 20th century, before the commercial production of art aimed at the tourist trade.

Special features of this book: follows a geographical organization across the continent; each chapter is reader friendly with clear, accessible sub-headings; represents important religious and utilitarian art traditions from the Sahara desert, West Africa, Central Africa, Northeast Africa, Eastern Africa, and Southern Africa; gives special attention to the themes of gender, power, and life cycle rituals, which frequently intersect with one another to form an understanding of the arts of Africa; includes figurative sculpture, masquerades, architecture, textiles, dress, ceramics, wall painting, and leatherwork traditions; includes selected examples of the earliest known documented art works as well as contemporary art of each geographical region; includes an up-to-date bibliography, incorporating recent published field research for each chapter; and features 369 black and white illustrations, 16 colored plates, maps, and a time line.

This magnificent celebration of the world's oldest and most diverse artistic traditions is considered the definitive book on African art. Ranging from the oldest known human artifact, circa 1.6 million BC, to pieces made within living memory, the objects collected in this extraordinary volume reflect a continent of enormous cultural and historical scope. Arranged chronologically within seven geographical sections, it offers an astonishing array of sculptures in wood, bronze, stone, and gold, as well as rock paintings, ceremonial pieces, ceramics, jewelry, and textiles culled from private and public collections around the world. Commentary by renowned scholars illuminates the cultural and historical significance of these pieces, and in-depth authoritative texts highlight critical aspects of each region. Together these words and images take readers on an artistic grand tour through a continent of unparalleled diversity, and towards the thrilling discovery of not one Africa, but many.

For use in an undergraduate or graduate course in African Art; also suitable as a supplementary reading for art history surveys. Lavishly illustrated, this historically grounded text draws together key traditions from West, Central, Eastern and Southern Africa to present an informative and captivating survey of the most important royal arts in the great sub-Saharan African kingdoms. Exploring the diverse ways that African rulers employed art and architecture to define individual and state identity, it provides an overview of the major themes in royal African art and discusses what these arts reveal about the nature of kingship.

A CD-ROM and DVD set extracted from the 'The Art of Africa: A Resource for Educators.' The CD-ROM "contains a PDF of 'The Art of Africa: A Resource for Educators, ' which features forty traditional works of African art in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It includes a brief overview of the Metropolitan's collection of African art; a short introduction and history of Africa; an explanation of the role of visual expression in the continent; descriptions of the featured works of art and background about the materials and techniques that were used to created them ... The DVD, 'Ci Wara Invocation, ' "presents the highlights of a dozen ci wara performances in Bamana communities in present-day Mali that were recorded by five different observers between 1970-2002. Among the Bamana, oral traditions credit a mythical being named Ci Wara, a divine being half mortal and half antelope, with the introduction of agriculture to the Bamana. The ci wara performances are part of biannual celebrations that either launch or conclude the farming season."--Container

The collections of the British Museum provide an exceptional resource for exploring both African antiquity and its contemporary arts and cultures. This book looks at the continent as a whole. It describes through a series of essays the history and arts of particular regions and the sources of the collections now in the Museum. Each section will be well-illustrated with a mix of archival and contemporary field photographs, and will also integrate illustrations of up to 50 important individual objects from this world-famous collection. The objects will have a commentary on their significance by leading figures in the field of African studies, many of them native to the areas from which the objects derive. The book brings to bear a mix of Western and African scholarship in an innovative collaboration to reassess one of the great African collections.

By focusing on the original scholarly contributions, rather than secondary description, this reader in tribal arts exposes the reader to the best original scholarship of 29 noted scholars in anthropology and art history. Each scholarly essay is well-illustrated, often with original field photographs as well as museum objects. For artists, art historians, sociologists, and all those interested in the arts of the fourth world.