African body art is used by men and women for various functions. They include but are not limited to festivals, feast celebrations, daily attire, beauty and force.
African masks are among the best pieces in the world of art and are highly sought after. They are typically carved out of wood, though some are made of fabric and other materials.
Long before the recording of accounts, the colorful history of African art has already been flourishing, reshaping itself with the contours of time. Depicting the versatile and elaborate societies and empires, African art history illustrates the vibrant civilizations and customs each group has nurtured with each consecutive generation. The oldest surviving examples are the rock carvings and paintings in Namibia, which are about 27,000 years old.
Long neglected and overlooked as a potential treasure trove of significant art works, African art and, in particular, African sculpture, exploded onto the international art scene in the 19th century when a group of colonialists discovered some of the most sophisticated bronze sculptures in the world, the Benin Bronzes. In fact, the earliest known sculptures were unearthed in the city of Nok in Nigeria’s south in 500BC and truth be told, it was the African artist’s ability to create objets d’art which engendered strong and emotional responses involving imagination and mysticism which prompted some of the leading artists of the time, including Picasso, Gauguin and Modigliani, to successfully embrace abstraction.
The topics and motifs engaged along or in the blend in African masks vary from more or less apparently recognizable human characteristics or busts (male, feminine, but only very seldom hermaphroditic) to the heads of animals monkey, crocodile, fish, birds, etc.). There are furthermore blends of the two encompassing horned humans and hybrid animals with human and animal characteristics or with traits usual of diverse animal species.