Narrative Wisdom and African Arts

How African visual arts intersect with oral traditions and memory.

Narrative Wisdom and African Arts explores how historical and contemporary African arts make visible narratives rooted in collective and individual memory and knowledge. Historical works made by artists across sub-Saharan Africa during the thirteenth to twentieth centuries dialogue with contemporary works by African artists working around the globe.

This is the first book to offer a comparative examination of intersections between African arts and narrative across expansive genres, cultures, periods, and contexts of patronage. More than two hundred color images explore an extensive array of media including sculpture in wood, ivory, metal, textiles, works on paper, photography, painting, and time-based media works. Acknowledging intersections between certain historical arts and oral traditions, Nichole N. Bridges surveys assorted visual modes and motives of arts that facilitate, document, reinforce, or critique narratives concerning the legitimacy of leaders, memory of place, prescriptions for healing and destiny, and enduring ancestral wisdom.