LACMA

Not currently on view

Diverse in appearance, material, and purpose, LACMA’s African artworks include body adornments, wooden masks with appliqués, small figures of wood and ivory, bronzes, beaded crowns, and stools. Exemplary works include bands of imported beads made by Ndebele women and used to signify marital status, divination objects such as a Yoruba Ifa tray, a bronze plaque depicting a seventeenth-century official of the Benin Kingdom, and ritual figures used by Namchi women to encourage pregnancy.

Nigeria, Yoruba peoples

Community Stories: Kerry James Marshall

April 12, 2010

. . . There are two paintings in the museum by Veronese. Two big paintings of saints. Those two pictures struck me as the most magnificent things I had ever seen. I grew up looking at a lot of comic books. The figures in those were like super heroes! It was the color, the tone, the drawing. The size. They were extraordinary. They were beyond. I also saw one of the most powerful things I had ever encountered. In the African Art section, there was a Senufo figure—burlap with feathers in the top and sticks for the arms. I had never seen anything like it. It was so mesmerizing. It had such a power. I didn’t know anything about it, but there was something about it that was haunting. I would go back to the museum to see that and the Veronese paintings all the time. Those two things had the most profound impact on me.

LACMA’s Collectors Committee Makes Two Major Acquisitions

April 27, 2009

. . . The collection of African textiles, from the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century Kuba culture of the Democratic Republic of Congo, helps enhance an important area of the museum’s collection. The 117 textiles and ceremonial skirts each feature unique geometric forms and rhythmic patterns, and were created collaboratively by both Kuba men and women. Within the culture these textiles were of the utmost prestige—traded as currency, given to kings as tribute, and used in ceremonial garb. In her presentation to the Collectors Committee on Saturday morning, curator Sharon Takeda told the story of twentieth-century missionaries who had come to the Congo offering the Kuba king a motorcycle as a gift, hoping to impress him with this magnificent feat of technology. The king paid the motorcycle no mind, but was captivated by the pattern of the tire tread left in the dirt, hoping to incorporate it into a textile pattern.