This week, Arts and Culture brings to you an indepth analysis and history of arts and culture from the African perspective courtesy of African Art.

African Art is an edition which focus on arts and culture in Africa and the world at large. African Art constitutes one of the most diverse legacies on earth. Though many observers tend to generalize "traditional" African art, the continent is full of peoples, societies, and civilizations, each with a unique visual culture. The definition also includes the art of the African Diaspora such as the art of African American. Despite this diversity, there are some unifying artistic themes when considering the totality of the visual culture from the continent of Africa.
Emphasis on human figure.

The human figure is the primary subject matter for most African art. During the historical period involving trade between Africa and Europe, the introduction of the human body into existing European pottery and other forms of art can be reliably taken as evidence of contact with African cultures.

In the fifteenth century, Portugal traded with the Sapi culture near Ivory Coast in West Africa, who created elaborate ivory saltcellars that were hybrids of African and European designs, most notably in the addition of the human figure.
Visual abstraction

African artworks tend to favor visual abstraction over naturalistic representation.  Ancient Egyptian art  was naturally depictive and it makes use of highly abstractive and regimented visual canons, especially in painting, as well as the use of different colors to represent the qualities and characteristics of an individual being depicted.

Sculpture
African artists tend to favor three-dimensional artworks over two-dimensional works. Even many African paintings or cloth works were meant to be experienced three-dimensionally. House paintings are often seen as a continuous design wrapped around a house, forcing the viewer to walk around the work to experience it fully; while decorated cloths are worn as decorative or ceremonial garments, transforming the wearer into a living sculpture.

Performance art is an extension of the utilitarianism and three-dimensionality of traditional African art. Much of it is crafted for use in performance contexts, rather than in static ones. For example, masks and costumes very often are used in communal, ceremonial contexts, where they are "danced." Most societies in Africa have names for their masks, but this single name incorporates not only the sculpture, but also the meanings of the mask, the dance associated with it, and the spirits that reside within. In African thought, the three cannot be differentiated.

Area of influence.
 African art has a long and surprisingly controversial history. Up until recently, the designation "African" was usually only bestowed on the arts of "Black Africa", the peoples living in sub-Saharan Africa. The non-black peoples of North Africa, the blacks of the Horn of Africa, as well as the art of Ancient Egypt, generally were not included under the rubric of African art.

Recently, there has been a movement among African art historians and other scholars to include the visual culture of these areas, since all the cultures that produced them, in fact, are located within the geographic boundaries of the African continent. The notion is that by including all African cultures and their visual culture in African art, laypersons will gain a greater understanding of the continent's cultural diversity. Since there was often a confluence of traditional African, Islamic and Mediterranean cultures, scholars have found that drawing distinct divisions between Muslim areas, ancient Egypt, the Mediterranean and indigenous black African societies makes little sense. Finally, the arts of the people of the African diaspora, prevalent in Brazil, the Caribbean and the southeastern United States, have also begun to be included in the study of African art.

To be continued