Today, we can find many replicas of the Asante people from Ashanti region of Ghana. These stools have a long history and a meaningful purpose to the Asante people. The "Golden Stool" is a royal throne which dates back to the late 17th Century and the legend of Okomfo Anokye. Anokye was an Ashanti priest who established a set of customs and rules for the people to follow. It is said Anokye caused the Golden Stool to fall from heaven onto the lap of the founder of the Asante nation, Osei Tutu. The Golden Stool was called Sika Dwa Kofi, meaning "Born on Friday," since it came from the sky on a Friday. Priest Anokye declared the stool "the soul and spirit of the Asante nation," and unified the nation towards an effective government using the stool to develop a "common citizenship" requiring "every person of the Asante union to place their loyalty in the stool." Only a high chief could touch the stool, and a new ruler was only legitimate if they had possession of the stool. The Golden Stool itself never touched the ground; it always rested on a blanket or mat. Also, the Golden Stool was not used as a stool, but instead was more of a shrine for the Asante.
*The picture noted above is a piece I currently have for sale on my website. It, as all my pieces, are original pieces from West Africa.
When I got to South Africa, it was as if I was in a storybook tale. The train ride was just the start of my sensitivity to the aesthetic beauty and personal discovery for a lifetime commitment of passion to the continent of Africa. South Africa differs variously from West Africa, which is where my art is born. My footprint on South Africa is one of simple fun and vacation. I remember the innumerable seals covering the oceanfront. There had to be hundreds, even thousands, literally covering the land. It was a marvelous sight to witness. Another fascinating object that caught my attention was the two oceans. The Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean meet at the most southern tip of Africa. The point where these two bodies of water meet are unbelievably noticeable. It is a natural phenomenon! The Indian Ocean's eastern position creates warmer temperatures, while the Atlantic Ocean's western position is cooled. Assuming there are many reasons for the visual difference in the water, the two oceans seemed as if they stayed on their own side, divided almost. Again, it was a great experience in Africa. I can't wait until my next trip to South Africa, sometime the beginning of 2010!
Our train ride to South Africa last several days. The train itself was one of the most magnificent ways of travel I have ever experienced, and I have traveled the world. The entire inside of it was carved from elaborate cherry wood. Our suite was unbelievably beautiful, and had it's own private refrigerator stocked with blue scotch, which is the best scotch money can buy apparently. The caboose had a huge bar set up; it was the party room! You could eat in the privacy of your room, but we never did because the dining room was excellent. The scenery was so spectacular, not even your wildest imagination could explain its beauty. I highly recommend traveling via one of the trains to South Africa if at all possible. There are several options with price tags that suit anyone's budget. It is a must see!
Looking back on the wonderful times I spent traveling the world, it makes me think about our 1996 safari trip in Africa. My husband and I were staying at the Mala Mala, which are similar to huts, but really nice, upscale huts. We woke up the morning of our safari and opened our sliding glass doors overlooking the land, and right outside our room was a beautiful herd of rhinos. It was amazing! We toured the reserve in jeeps and saw a wild kill. It was a female lion killing a warthog, which were plentiful on the land. As we approached the lion, she took off running with us in pursuit through the jungle. The terrain was rugged, so we all had to hang on tight as the jeep tore across the land chasing the lion and her kill. We couldn't believe our eyes when we followed the lion back to cubs. She killed the hog to feed her cubs. It was an experience straight out of Planet Earth!
Traditional Africa depends on their belief of their ancestral spirits as a influence on their present day activities. Connecting this belief to everyday life guides the people in their daily actions and thoughts. For example, family members in current day Africa are still affected by the past actions of their ancestors. The Western world differs in way of thought, instead depending on technology, government and pharmaceutical companies. Medicine men or healers fulfill roles of doctors and heal the sick through rituals and herbs taken from the land. All traditional African activities are joined to the spirit world. When a tribal party gathered to hunt, they first prayed to their ancestors for guidance and a successful outing. After the successful hunt, they would pay homage to their ancestors by spilling blood of the animal kill to say thanks. What the Western world might call a superstition, the Africans believe these sacrifices are in exchange for advice, guidance and help. This complex relationship between the world of the dead and the living is how traditional African people base their reality of life.
This article is based off writings from No!Mercy Products.
Below is the article published in the September 14, 2009, Via Christi newsletter:
Stone Madonna displayed in St. Francis rose garden
The rose garden on the west side of Via Christi-St. Francis, just north of the Emergency Department, has a new addition: a 400-pound impressionistic representation of the Madonna.
This statue was donated by Rex Lee, MD, and his wife, Arvella. Dr. lee was a general surgeon with Via Christi for more than 50 years. About eight years ago, Arvella Lee came across a group of local sculpture artists in Zimbabwe, Africa. She purchased the statue of the Madonna and had it shipped to the U.S. The Lees decided to donate the sculpture to Via Christi upon retirement.
"I had always wanted to donate the statue to Via Christi because it was a Madonna," said Arvella Lee.
Facilities Management had some difficulty when deciding how to display the statue.
The statue's size, weight and narrow base posed problems. Experts consulted by Ken Sloan, Plant Operations trade lead, said drilling holes in the bottom could break the statue.
In the end, it was decided that drilling holes into the thickest part of the staue at the back and inserting tow anchor bolts would be the safest way to secure it. Sloan designed a decorative black wrought iron arbor with a plate of meatl in the center to serve a two-fold dunction: as a support structure to bolt the staue to, and as a backdrop behind the Madonna.
The sculpture now stands on a polishe granite base.
"We felt that Via Christi was a good recipient because my husband was associated with the Medical Center and he loved it there," said Arvella Lee. "It was a part of our lives."
In my last blog posting discussing my Dolphin Stone, I mentioned an artist named Patrick Kutinyu. He has been a large part in my discoveries of African artifacts. I wanted to give him credit for his part of my passion in this art. Patrick was born in Zimbabwe, which is located in the southern part of the continent of Africa. He and his grandfather lived as hunters. Patrick's passion for the wildlife of Africa was expressed when he carved in the native stone. All of Patrick's work was fabricated from stone, and through this he brought the animals of Africa to life. He has personally sculpted stone art for me, as you read in my previous blog. When I met him, is when I saw the fascinating world of Africa through his eyes, and ultimately gave birth to my collection for stones.
Since I am currently working on adding my stone collection to my website, I thought I would share with you the story about the creation of my Dolphin piece. This piece is one-of-a-kind, as all of my pieces are since they are originals. I was working with an artist from Zimbabwe named Patrick Kutinyu. We woke early on this particular morning with one purpose - to search for rocks. We must have walked for miles staring and flipping rocks trying to imagine the shape it could take when paired with an artist and his tools. People from the group would often shout my name to come look at the rock and have me give my acknowledgment. There were so many rocks that could ultimately take the shape of anything, depending on one's imagination. Patrick finally found a rock that he was fond of and admired. We both agreed it was a nice piece, big enough that even your grandest desire could come to life. He told me he had an idea of what he wanted to sculpt from the rock. I trusted his talent, and decided I wanted him to surprise me. When an artist is inspired, the most amazing creations become a masterpiece. So, we gathered the rock and hauled it back to civilization. I would spend the next several days visiting Patrick's space where he carved his art. The first day or two I started to see the top of the rock become a distinct pattern, an unfamiliar one at this point. I tried to guess what Patrick's design was going to be, but I never guessed correctly until days later when it unveiled itself. It was a dolphin! It was the most magnificent stone I had ever seen. This piece is exquisite. Anyone who is lucky enough to own this piece is truly a prize winner.
Each piece of bronze art is unique. African artwork pieces made from metal, including bronze, copper and brass for example, are made by a process called lost-wax casting. This process requires a steady-hand with a detailed-eye and masterful skill. Knowledge in metalworking and pottery are involved in sculpting these pieces of art. Beeswax is molded at a low melting temperature, and then sculpted into it's one-of-a-kind masterpiece. Clay pieces are added to the wax and allowed to harden. The clay captures the intricate details of the carved wax. When the piece is fired, cured with flame, the wax melts away leaving the clay pottery mold. The liquid metal, in this case bronze, is poured in the clay shell and allowed to harden. After the piece has cooled, the clay mold is broken to reveal the metal sculpture. Because the clay piece is destroyed, each piece has it's own unique qualities.
A ritual bowl with a large lid surmounted by a human head and placed between the legs of two larger human figures with long necks and rounded heads. Dark and light brown patinas with multiple traces of kaolin and eroded spots. Height: 13 3/4" Category: Ritualware, Aboriginal Indigenous Art Location: Luba, Congo, Africa Period: Ca. 19th Century Appraised Value: $12,000.00
If you are interested in purchasing this piece, please make offer from our website AfricanArtsNStone or call 316.655.7968.
I thought this was a positve article and wanted to share it with everyone.
Making Art Accessible
Roslyn Walker plans to extend the African museum into the classroom and send exhibits on the road
By Michael Kernan
"Westerners have been discovering African art for hundreds of years," says Roslyn A. Walker, the energetic director of the National Museum of African Art. "Maybe there's some rediscovery going on, too. In the 1960s many Africans gained independence, and that brought new attention to African culture and art. The Peace Corps brought a lot of young people to Africa, and some of them majored in various areas of African studies. More recently, the President's visit there got people interested again."
And if there was still any question of some not getting the message, her museum will soon take care of that. She is determined to open it up to those who haven't heard yet.
"I want to extend the museum into the larger world. I want our exhibits to relate to people's lives. African art certainly addresses all the events in the human life cycle."
I talked to her in her wonderfully cluttered office. (A huge table is covered with papers: she knows where everything is, but there is one unusual item, an x-ray of an African sculpture. X-rays, I learn, help determine the authenticity and value of objects — whether they've been broken and repaired or the wood has been recarved.) "Do Africans themselves appreciate what the museum has to offer?" I asked.
"African immigrants in the area? Oh yes! Take some of the African taxi drivers, for example."
There are a large number of them, as anyone who has been around Washington knows, and they come here from all over the African continent. "I take a lot of taxis," she said, "and I ask the drivers if they've been to the museum, and I get mixed responses. Some drivers are enthusiastic and some aren't: for some it's a reminder of a past they would rather forget. But others like to celebrate their Africanness. Those are the ones who give me a break on the taxi fare!" she laughed.
Actually, local Africans more or less take over the museum on occasion, and this is what happened last spring when a group of Yoruba immigrants performed a baby-naming ceremony and some 2,000 visitors attended. "It was a visual extravaganza, winding all through the building with dancing and everything. We also have invited the wives of African ambassadors to the museum and encouraged them to bring their children. We want them to consider this a little bit of Africa in the District of Columbia, a home away from home."
Walker plans to set up traveling exhibitions to go with other Smithsonian mobile shows. A display of photographs by Constance Stuart Larrabee, a British-born South African who left a remarkable body of work depicting scenes of life in and around Pretoria and Johannesburg, is slated to become the African museum's first traveling exhibition.
And she wants to service the classrooms with educational products.
"You mean in the Washington area?" I said, like a fool. She gave me a look. "Around the world! Why not? Certainly around the country. I don't mean artifacts, but educational materials — slide kits, CD-ROMs, or whatever current technological mediums can help teachers teach African arts and culture."
Last March in connection with the opening of a major show of sculpture by Yoruba artist Olowe of Ise (c. 1875-1938), the museum had a Family Day, attended by some 3,000 people. For Walker the best thing about it was that people didn't just stray into the building through the underground passageway from the adjoining Sackler Gallery, where heads fail to get counted among the museum's 240,000 annual visitors. They entered through the proper front door: they had intended to come to the African museum in the first place.
"That was the best fun. I'd love to have a family day for every new exhibition. We offered storytelling, dance performances, Yoruba and other African board games, as well as art workshops. After viewing the Yoruba beaded crown on exhibit, for example, visitors made beaded necklaces and other items in the workshops."
The activity room was put to work as never before. Four models showing stages of a sculpture in iroko wood, representing a kneeling female figure by Moses Ajiboye of Nigeria, were set out for people to touch and explore. Visitors often ask about the woods used in many African sculptures, Walker told me, so samples were provided of everything from red oak to pine, enabling people to heft them and note the grain.
"We showed how Yoruba style differs from other ethnic styles, and you could go through and compare Olowe's art with Olowe wannabes. One exercise was to identify a Yoruba sculpture from among a group by artists with similar styles."
One favorite project was to complete, on paper, a sculpted wooden door by Olowe that had been altered, possibly because of damage. What you had to do was imagine what the artist had intended and draw the rest of that door.
During the activities, a tape played of one of Olowe's wives singing a praise poem honoring the artist, and master drummers also provided music during this busy day. On other occasions, African potters and weavers have demonstrated their technique.
"We treated our visitors to a taste experience," she told me. "Chin-chin, cookies made from a sweetened, deep-fried dough that are popular in Nigeria, were served. We asked them to eat only in the pavilion, but of course they wandered around with the food, and we wound up picking up crumbs all over the place."
Like Western art, African art has its roots in religion. But as Walker pointed out, there have always been individual artists whose names were known in their societies. "African art was never anonymous," she said, "it was just that the collectors of art and cultural information rarely asked who made this or that. Often there was the assumption that art-making was a communal process, that everyone in the village was a cocreator.
"But this was not the case. You always had individual master sculptors, artists who had their own ateliers, master carvers with wide-ranging reputations who were summoned from far away to work for this family or that king. The greater their talent, the greater their reputation. Artists weren't confined to one small area but crossed all borders."
Contemporary African art has branched out in new directions as has Western art," Walker reminded me. "In the past, African women pretty much stuck to the traditional media of pottery and fiber or textiles, but now we have Sokari Douglas Camp, a Nigerian woman who sculpts by welding steel." She has some marvelous kinetic sculptures on view in the museum's pavilion. This spring, the museum's Point of View Gallery, which focuses on smaller exhibitions, exploring a few objects or even a single object in innovative ways, will showcase Church Ede, a monumental kinetic sculpture of a funerary bed by Sokari Douglas Camp. Made in honor of her father, it features figures that periodically fan the bed as would attendants to a real Nigerian funerary bed.
Some shows prove once again the extraordinary influence of African art upon the world's other artists. There was a display of furniture by Pierre-Emile Legrain, a French Art Deco master who died in 1929. His wonderful chairs and stools are clearly influenced by work from the Asante of Ghana, and particularly by a wood and brass creation from the Ngombe people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Through May 9, the museum will feature "Baule: African Art/Western Eyes," which contrasts how Western museums present some of Baule's outstanding works with the way the Baule people experience art in their native environment.
I was impressed by a large exhibition, "Images of Power and Identity," which brings us African art south of the Sahara. These masks and figures, mostly of wood but a few of gold and silver, are bursting with vitality. A mwadi mask from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, four feet tall, with a raffia ruff at the base, eyeholes and a great striped fishtail crown, was worn by a diviner to celebrate the new moon. A 19th-century life-size figure of a man from Cameroon, sporting thousands of beads and shells, exudes both power and humor, as does a crocodile headdress with huge spiraling horns.
And this summer, the museum will display some of the most beautiful and creative types of headgear contained in the collection in "Hats Off: A Salute to African Headgear."
The Sylvia H. Williams Gallery, named for the museum's former director and dedicated to contemporary art, will showcase a major concentration of South African art, running from June to September and complementing the South African component of the Folklife Festival on the Mall. The exhibition should bring swarms of visitors into the museum, many of whom perhaps have no idea of the extent and variety of African art.
An upcoming series, "Films from Côte d'Ivoire," will include works by directors from this hub of African filmmaking that have been distinguished at major film festivals around the world. The museum will also offer a special conservation clinic for the public, a film and talk on African art trading, plus performances by dancers and musicians from the Ivory Coast.
Walker, who earned her master's degree and doctorate from Indiana University, has worked with African art most of her 54 years, having long served as senior curator at this, the only museum in the country dedicated exclusively to the collection, conservation, exhibition and study of African art. For seven years before coming here she was director of the Illinois State University Museums at Normal.
Though her father, a Memphis pharmacist, died when she was 6 and her mother when she was 14, she was still raised by relatives. "I did have a family," she said. "My mother's youngest sister, Jim Etta Lee, and her husband, Uncle Robert, raised me. He died when I was in graduate school, but I have been fortunate in having mentors. I've had a lot of support from family, friends, teachers, and scholars and professionals in the museum field."
Early on, at Southern University's Laboratory High School, she thought she might become a journalist but was also interested in painting and the flute. Teachers encouraged her. In fact, one teacher thought so much of Walker's artwork that she saved it. This was the kind of loving help that enabled this talented young person to carry on.
After graduate school she worked at the Nigerian National Museum in Lagos and the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. She is passing along to others the same kind of support that she has had. The museum takes on interns and museum fellows every year. "We mentor them," she said. "We stay in contact with them and try to push them along. We are training another generation of scholars and museum professionals who will continue to help the Western world rediscover Africa's treasures, who will keep Africa on the minds of the public."
I have a website showcasing some of the many different artifacts I discovered in Africa. If you have a passion for African artifacts or just getting started, come check it out!
My first trip to Africa opened my eyes to the beauty of this continent's art, in particular the stone arts. I toured my way over the land absorbing all the fascinating types of art. After speaking to several artists working with hand-carved stones, I knew I wanted to learn more about the customs and meanings of the pieces. My excitement grew as I waited on a container of stone artifacts I had shipped back home to the U.S. This interest was the start of many trips back to Africa to experience more of the culture surrounding their art. Artifacts from Africa are my passion, and an exciting way to display another aspect of art in interior decorating. Each piece of art has a heartfelt meaning derived from a history and culture of love.
Today, we can find many replicas of the Asante people from Ashanti region of Ghana. These stools have a long history and a meaningful purpose to the Asante people. The "Golden Stool" is a royal throne which dates back to the late 17th Century and the legend of Okomfo Anokye. Anokye was an Ashanti priest who established a set of customs and rules for the people to follow. It is said Anokye caused the Golden Stool to fall from heaven onto the lap of the founder of the Asante nation, Osei Tutu. The Golden Stool was called Sika Dwa Kofi, meaning "Born on Friday," since it came from the sky on a Friday. Priest Anokye declared the stool "the soul and spirit of the Asante nation," and unified the nation towards an effective government using the stool to develop a "common citizenship" requiring "every person of the Asante union to place their loyalty in the stool." Only a high chief could touch the stool, and a new ruler was only legitimate if they had possession of the stool. The Golden Stool itself never touched the ground; it always rested on a blanket or mat. Also, the Golden Stool was not used as a stool, but instead was more of a shrine for the Asante.
