Spend one Sunday afternoon learning the wonders of African Art! Jean Borgatti, Consulting Curator of Global Africa, First Peoples - North America and Oceania at the Fitchburg Art Museum, will delve in to a different aspect of African Art each month! This series of talks is meant as an introduction to African Art, its variety of forms, the depth of its history, and how it became an important player first in Western culture and continues to be important in a global world. A reading list will be available for anyone who wants to delve more deeply into any one topic. Jean Borgatti, our speaker, will invite participants to online workspace where she will post additional images, articles, and links to videoclips for anyone interested. 

For those interested in additional resources from the get-go, Jean suggests Christopher Spring’s African Art in Detail (2010), full of wonderful illustrations from the collections of the British Museum and a very accessible, readable text. Chris Spring served as a curator at the BM from 1987 until his retirement in 2018. I might also suggest Suzanne Blier’s book The History of African Art (2023). Suzanne Blier is a distinguished scholar and professor of art history at Harvard University. This is a new textbook based on many years of research, writing and teaching. Both are available on Amazon.

This month- CLICK HERE to register on zoom and receive the link.

Case Studies: Art in Cultural Context: the Yoruba of Nigeria and the Dogon of Mali

Case Studies: Art in Cultural Context: Contrasting Cultures – Contrasting Styles -The Dogon of Mali and the Yoruba of Nigeria. The Dogon, living in the harsher world of the Western Sudan, create multi-functional sculpture in a style based on cubes and angles; the Yoruba, with a very large and diverse population live in more tropical zones in Southern Nigeria and the Benin Republic. Their art tends to be more purposecreated and based on lush oval forms..