31 Facts About African art

African art describes the modern and historical paintings, sculptures, installations, and other visual culture from native or indigenous Africans and the African continent.

African art includes prehistoric and ancient art, Islamic art of West Africa, the Christian art of East Africa, and the traditional artifacts of these and other regions.

Much African art sculpture was historically in wood and other natural materials that have not survived from earlier than a few centuries ago, although rare older Pottery and metal figures can be found from a number of areas.

African art has had an important influence on European Modernist art, which was inspired by their interest in abstract depiction.

West African art cultures developed bronze casting for reliefs, like the famous Benin Bronzes, to decorate palaces and for highly naturalistic royal heads from around the Bini town of Benin City, Edo State, as well as in terracotta or metal, from the 12th–14th centuries.

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Many West African art figures are used in religious rituals and are often coated with materials placed on them for ceremonial offerings.

In Central Africa, however, the main distinguishing characteristics include heAfrican art-shaped faces that are curved inward and display patterns of circles and dots.

African art takes many forms and is made from many different materials.

African art jewellery is made from such diverse materials as Tiger's eye stone, haematite, sisal, coconut shell, beads and ebony wood.

Many African cultures emphasize the importance of ancestors as intermediaries between the living, the gods, and the supreme creator, and art is seen as a way to contact these spirits of ancestors.

Colonization during the nineteenth century set up a Western understanding hinged on the belief that African art lacked technical ability due to its low socioeconomic status.

Contemporary African art was pioneered in the 1950s and 1960s in South Africa by artists like Irma Stern, Cyril Fradan, Walter Battiss and through galleries like the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg.

African art valued discovering art within the society of the artist, including culture, tradition, and background.

Some of these works of African art can be stone carvings, potteries, glass work, wood carvings and bronze works.

Benin art is the art from the Kingdom of Benin or Edo Empire, a pre-colonial African state located in what is known as the South-South region of Nigeria.

Collectively, the objects form the best-known examples of Benin African art, created from the thirteenth century onwards, by the Edo people, which included other sculptures in brass or bronze, including some famous portrait heads and smaller pieces.

African art wears a netted cap with chevron design decorated with a feather.

Yoruba African art is best known for the heads from Ife, made of ceramic, brass and other materials.

The stylistic variations in Bambara African art are extreme sculptures, masks and headdresses display either stylized or realistic features, and either weathered or encrusted patinas.

Influence from Tellem African art is evident in Dogon African art because of its rectilinear designs.

Dogon African art is extremely versatile, although common stylistic characteristics – such as a tendency towards stylization – are apparent on the statues.

In pAfrican art, this is because so few people from Burkina have become Muslim or Christian.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church has been the predominant religion in Ethiopia for over 1500 years, for most of this period in a very close relation, or union, with the Coptic Christianity of Egypt, so that Coptic African art has been the main formative influence on Ethiopian church African art.

Prehistoric rock art comparable to that of other African sites survives in a number of places and, until the arrival of Christianity, stone stelae, often carved with simple reliefs, were erected as grave-markers and for other purposes in many regions; Tiya is one important site.

However, Ethiopian African art is highly conservative and retained much of its distinct character until modern times.

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Tinga Tinga African art has roots in decorating hut walls in central and south Tanzania.

Luba African art was not very uniform because of the vast territory which the kingdom controlled.

Fang African art is characterized by organized clarity and distinct lines and shapes.

The African art ranged from stone carvings of both massive statues and small statuettes, to wall African art that depicted both history and mythology.

Lot of the African art possesses a certain stiffness, with figures poised upright and rigid in a regal fashion.

However, Nubian African art was not merely a product of colonization by ancient Egypt, but rather due to a mutual exchange of ideas and ideologies along the Nile Valley.