Magazines - Tribal Art Autumn 2009

By Holly W. Ross

Introduction
This fall, the Princeton University Art Museum will present Life Objects: Rites of Passage in African Art, an exhibition devoted to the traditional arts of Africa. Organized in conjunction with “Art and the Lifecycle in Africa,” a seminar taught by Chika Okeke-Agulu, assistant professor of Art and Archaeology, and African American Studies at Princeton University, these rarely seen objects are of exceptional quality and have been drawn from the Princeton University Art Museum’s own collection, the collection of the National Museum of African Art, and private collections.
Life Objects highlights the interconnections in daily life between the living and the dead, and between humans and spiritual entities. It explores the cyclical path linking the natural and metaphysical worlds that characterizes the worldviews of many traditional African societies. Through the display of objects in diverse media and formats, the exhibition illustrates how the course of birth, death, and reincarnation, as well as the unending interactions between humans, spirits, gods, and ancestors, are affirmed, reified, and sustained through ritual performances in which such art objects play an important role.