Innovation, Motion, and Assemblage: The Art, Architectural, and Landscape History of West and Central Africa

3 units

Across millennia, the peoples of West and Central Africa developed, curated, and innovated the conceptual and material worlds they inhabited through a multitude of creative and inventive practices. From the creation and use of masks, to the building and maintenance of grand palaces, to the construction of entire monumental landscapes, these groups explored and made sense of life, reality, and being within a wider cosmos, via inventive engagement across multiple material and intangible media, and through exploration of various aesthetic, spiritual, and social philosophies mediated by the production of art, architecture, and landscape. As people worked with clays, metals, stone, textiles, ivories, and other materials, they navigated social realities such as political hierarchy and gender divisions, connected with religious notions such as the continued role of ancestors and deities in daily life, and shaped, explored, and represented their very notions of being. Especially prevalent across many of the arts of these regions were evolving notions of motion, change, innovation, and assemblage that underpinned artistic and architectural engagement. Art, architecture, and landscape manifested and reified these concepts and philosophies in a number of ways, regularly designed to be used and conceived of in motion (e.g., masks and masquerade costumes), centering individual and group innovation and improvisation in their composition (e.g., in distinctive styles of figurative arts), and often combining and interacting with other parts to form larger assemblages or composites that were seen to act upon the world in new ways (e.g., shrines and sacred grove sites).