african art lessons at African Antiques

African Art David Norden |Mail|map Sint Katelijnevest 27. B2000 ANTWERPEN-Belgium. Tel +32 3 227 35 40
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African Art lessons

Students Learn to Seal the Deal, African Style

African Art Lessons

Lessons in Bargaining Have Long-Term Goal Of Countering Prejudice

Liberian-born storyteller Vera Oye Yaa-Anna selects Isahy Castillo and Carolyn Jean Harvey, both 8, to help her demonstrate in the Claremont Immersion Elementary School classroom how people in West Africa eat communally.
Photo Credit: By Carol Guzy -- The Washington Post

By Tara Bahrampour found at the Washington Post Sunday, March 25, 2007

If you spot Arlington County kids trying to persuade cashiers at Whole Foods or 7-Eleven to knock 50 cents off a soda or chocolate bar, don't blame them. They might just be honing new skills learned at school.

African art lessons links

Punu mask lesson is a pdf lesson about the Punu mask and Picasso on http://www.behindtheglass.org/

African Masks Project created by Leilani Carbonell Pedroni.
Why are masks important to African traditions and cultures?
This is an educational site hosted by My eCoach that details an African Mask research project where students re-create an African mask using paper mache and learn about the uses of the mask and the people of Africa. My eCoach provides resources for teachers and students including professional development, elibrary of free educational materials, and low-cost technology tutorial guides.

http://www.clevelandart.org/educef/distance/html/4312127.html Distant learning program

Africa timeline By the Metropolitan Museum

Online african course list http://www.lib.msu.edu/limb/a-z/az.html

Ashanti goldweights from the Faculty's London Collection

http://aic.stanford.edu/jaic/articles/jaic31-01-002.html A text on the non tangible atributes of african art

http://www.tribalarts.com/feature/kwele/index.html article about Kwele masks

www.tribalarts.com/feature/bongo/index.html article about the Bongo

www.tribalarts.com/feature/lawal/index.html article about Yoruba hairdresses.

Chokwe art Chokwe, Lwena, Luvale, Lunda and Related Peoples of Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia. Many images, good texts.

African art and the Web Museum from Benjamin Caleb Ray. A university course.

A Teacher's guide. General info

shields and weapons at the Pitt rivers Museum. Very informative, complete database, but no images.

A Website from Herbert Roese with some very interesting background texts about “AFRICAN SCULPTURAL ART”, from pre-ironage examples in South Africa, to figurines from West Africa, to modern sculptures in Zimbabwe.

Akan symbol project from Ghana. Architecture, metal castings, textiles, wood carving, pottery

Etudes sur L'art Africain. In French: need a translator ?

Jembetat tribes list

Anthropology course

Initiation Its in French but links go often to English sites.
Test your knowledge and learn about african art.

Antiques Roadshow . About a Dogon horse figure expertise.

G. I. Jones -Photographic Archive of Southeastern Nigerian Art and Culture

Clickable Map of the African Continent from the Guggenheim Museum.

Ethnologue Language Family Index Niger-Congo All tribe names with explanation

The Internet An ethnographic approach. by Daniel Miller and Don Slater University of London. It's not about african art but about tribes etc...

African recipes .Miam-miam

Divination art. At the Metropolitan museum

Learn from the Encarta encyclopedia about African Art and architecture.

Students at several county elementary schools in recent weeks have received unusual instruction in the art of bargaining. They've learned how it works in less-developed countries where farmers and fishermen sell their wares in open markets, with a special focus on economic customs of the West African nation of Mali.

That is how Holly Darnell, 9, came to be standing one day before a row of her Claremont Immersion Elementary School classmates selling toy produce in baskets. She picked up a fistful of greens.

"How much for this delicious-looking parsley?" she said.

The answer: 75 cents.

"Say 50," prompted Vera Oye Yaa-Anna, a woman swathed in the bright yellow and red patterns of her native continent. "Auntie Oye," a professional storyteller from Liberia, goes from school to school, lining classrooms with bold African cloths, animal-hide drums, straw fans, large stuffed jungle animals and an orangey, 12-foot-long python skin.

She teaches students a little about Liberia and its founding in the 1800s by freed slaves from the United States but mostly about Mali, a country of 12 million people that is the size of Texas and California combined. There, she tells them, mud is an ingredient in cloth-making, people shop for food every day because they don't have refrigerators and life centers on communal activities.

"I teach them how to deal with people who may not be like us," she said. "Your individuality in Africa doesn't work because we work together as a community."

Yaa-Anna said she is motivated to teach kids about Africa in part because of prejudice she has encountered in the United States. For example, she said, people here sometimes assume that because she is from Africa, she must be hungry.

"If these [students] can cultivate a love for Africa, then that's my job," she said. "So that when they become adults, they won't stereotype like I've been stereotyped."

Mary Eckstein, a humanities project coordinator for Arlington public schools, said Yaa-Anna's work dovetails with a state-required curriculum segment on Mali, part of the third grade's study of ancient cultures. Yaa-Anna's visits to six Arlington schools this year are part of a pilot project, funded by a $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to a unit of the county Department of Parks, Recreation and Cultural Resources.

Teachers chose from a list of artists for classroom presentations on folk art from around the world.

"Vera was very popular," Eckstein said. She said one teacher who hadn't originally picked Yaa-Anna asked her to come back when his students saw what she was doing with other classes.

One day this month, Claremont third-graders went to an assembly on African instruments and participated in a West African feast cooked by parents and Yaa-Anna. Sitting on the floor, she taught them to eat from a communal plate, how to scoop coconut rice into their right hands before popping it into their mouths.

U.S. children may be experts in wheedling things from their parents. But Yaa-Anna told a Claremont class it is important to see the viewpoints of both seller and buyer when bargaining at the market.

If you are farmers, she told them, you grow your food and have to sell it at a price to turn a profit. If you are buyers, you have a lot of children to feed and not much money. But each side must be reasonable, she advised. Otherwise, no transactions would go through.

"Say, 'I don't have 75 cents,' " she instructed Holly. "Say, 'I need to feed my family.' "

"Fifty cents?" Holly tried.

"Say, 'Lady, I planted these, and I'm not going to take less,' " Yaa-Anna said to the girl who was selling produce.

Holly tried again: "Sixty-five?"

But the seller wouldn't budge, and Holly ended up paying full price.

Jonathan Ponce, 9, was less compliant. "Are you mad?" he asked, flinging down an orange for which his classmate Cesar Ramirez, 8, had asked a dollar.

"If you mess with my food one more time, I'm going to call the police," Cesar replied.

Another buyer, Francesca Salas, 8, threw down a bunch of cherries in a huff, and Yaa-Anna cut in. "Don't get angry! Because you have to come back to the market tomorrow, so you have to have good relations."

By the end of the hour, the students had learned to strike deals. Natalie Skoloda, 8, agreed to lower the price of her fish from $15 to $14.

"Give the money quickly!" Yaa-Anna urged the buyer. "Because if you take too long to give the money, they might change their mind."

The invisible money changed hands. The cloth fish went into a pot.