what religious images say about identity, survival and change
Feb 2023
22
[ad_1] To “read” the history of times before writing, scholars have traditionally used excavated evidence. Remains like dwellings, burials and pots can reveal a lot about how people lived long ago. In southern Africa, there is another archive to “read” too: rock art. Rock art is primarily a record of spiritual beliefs – but also reflects the events that these beliefs made sense of. Hunter-gatherers in the region, ancestors of today’s San or BaTwa, made rock art for thousands of years before African herders and farmers arrived from the north 2,000 years ago and European colonists followed by sea 350...... 
[ad_1] There’s a thesaurus worth of terms I could use to describe the nearly 300 sculptures included in “The Language of Beauty in African Art,” the Art Institute’s first exhibition of traditional African arts in over a decade. My choice of words, though, will be predicated on the ideas of beauty and ugliness that I have absorbed over the years as an adult female resident of the north side of Chicago, as a scholar of Western and Japanese art history, as a reader of Victorian novels, as an Ashkenazi Jewish kid growing up in the 1980s in an Anglophone suburb......