Life Objects: Rites of Passage in African Art features twenty-three superb works from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art, the Princeton University Art Museum, and private collections. Focusing on the conjunction of art, religion, and ritual in key phases of the human life cycle in indigenous African societies, Life Objects makes apparent how the course of birth-death-reincarnation and the interactions of humans, spirits, gods, and ancestors have been made manifest through art. The formal eloquence and the stunning range of styles and media of the “life objects” provide compelling witness to the diversity of artistic traditions and individual creativity in traditional African societies.
The exhibition, organized by Chika Okeke-Agulu, assistant professor of Art and Archaeology and African American Studies, and independent scholar Holly W. Ross, represents a renewed commitment to exploring the arts of Africa on the part of the Princeton University Art Museum, itself one of the great repositories of global artistic practice in the United States, with international holdings numbering some 72,000 works of art.