In General (African Art post 2/10)

African art is based on two different sections, whereas North African countries that are situated in the Mediterranean have different cultures from Sub-African countries. There are even differences in their arts as a big percentage of them are Islamic and places like Ethiopia have a long Christian tradition. As one knows, Africa is full of different societies and civilisations and this concludes that they all have a unique culture, where this even includes African Americans.

 

Catholic African Art                          Islamic Art 

Anyways, Most African arts are based on sculptures, where they are based on wood and organic materials which unfortunately they didn’t survive a long time, yet they even used to use pottery, where it still survives till today. Their subjects were generally based on human figures and usually emended to stylised figures. They vary in their styles in art, but their original use of art was sculptures among other art forms. A lot of Sub-African tribes used to produce masks, where they used to be used during a religious ceremony where as today they are made to be sold to tourists, these masks as one can see are un-uniform as their forms are usually elongated.

  

In West Africa, cultures are different and they used to make the use of bronze, where they used bronze to decorate places with a fine naturalistic looks, as they used terracotta and metal too between the 12^th and the 14^th century. There was even a find of golden metal sculptures where apparently they used to be used in ceremonies during the 1400-1900 periods.

In East Africa, just like I was writing in the other post, there they produce Tinga Tinga paintings, but not only that, they even produced Makonde sculptures, whereas in the East they even produce textile arts as a tradition. Yet, in Zimbabwe it’s quite different from all of the above, where they based their art on impressive buildings rather than sculptures yet Modern Zimbabwe people that produce sculptures have achieved success internationally.

        

Tinga Tinga                                  Makonde sculptures                          Zimbabwe Architecture

In South Africa, they used to work in clay where old figures dating back to 400-600AD were formed with cylinder formed heads with a mixture of features from human beings and animals.

African art - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 2013. African art - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. [ONLINE] Available at:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_art.