African Art Classification

Through the last half century, the techniques used by certain historians of African art for judging the precise tribal origins of African sculptures on the basis of style have been greatly refined. However, as one recent critic of the historians’ classificatory assumptions has put it, the idea that the distribution of a . . a decided falsification of the very life of art in Africa.”

Objects and styles have often been diffused through trade, most notably by workshops of artists who sell their work over a large geographical area. Styles cannot be narrowly defined as belonging uniquely to a particular area; rather, there are important “centers of style” throughout Africa where families, clans, and workshops produce sculpture art historians who attempt to assign particular objects to individual groups on the basis of style.

One such center of style is located in the village of Ouri, in central Burkina Faso, where members of the Konaté family continue a long tradition of sculpture production not only for five major neighboring ethnic groups, but in recent times also for the tourist trade in Ouagadougou. The Konaté sculptors are subtly different that few people outside of the area can distinguish Nuna masks from Ko masks.

Perhaps historians of African art should ask if objects in similar styles were produced in centers of style, where artists belonging to one ethnic group produced art for all of their neighbors. Perhaps it is even more important to cease attempting to break down large regional styles into finer and finer tribal clear, one cannot readily tell which group produced an object by analyzing fine style characteristics.