Arts

Admittedly, the influence of African sculpture on modern art has virtually eliminated the evolutionist prejudice against its conceptual form. Yet it has encouraged a scholarly bias for figure sculpture and masks from West, Central, and Equatorial Africa, marginalizing the equally significant artistic expressions in other media within and outside the region. Until the turn of the twenty-first century, this bias isolated the study of sub-Saharan African art from those of northern, northeastern, and southern parts of the continent, where the decorative arts predominate.

It is gratifying to note, however, that in the early twenty-first century scholars are beginning to correct this anomaly. Surveys cover not only the entire continent (including Ancient Egypt, Nubia, and the Swahili civilizations of East Africa) but also previously neglected art forms such as body adornment, weaving, pottery, calabash decoration, leatherwork, beadwork, and architecture. Thanks to new data from archaeology, prehistoric rock art, various eyewitness accounts by Arab and European visitors to the continent between the eleventh and nineteenth centuries, and works of African origin that found their way to Europe from the fifteenth century onward, it has become possible to attempt a more comprehensive and reliable overview of the artistic developments in the continent from the earliest times to the present, though there are still gaps in knowledge.