Feature Article:
Echoing Images:
Couples in African Sculpture
by Alisa LaGamma
Over the centuries and across a vast, culturally diverse landscape, artists from sub-Saharan Africa have distinguished themselves as exceptional sculptors in a range of media that includes terra-cotta, brass, ivory, and especially wood. Given wood’s relative vulnerability to the elements, fire, humidity, and insect damage, the corpus of African sculptures in that medium that were exported to the West beginning in the late nineteenth century were generally no more than a century old at that time. Consequently, they are typically dated between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. |
