In Focus

This [25-foot] slide-projection piece, 187 color images projected at varying intervals with a sound track, was entirely photographed and recorded in the Rhine river swamps on the periphery of the towns of Düsseldorf and Cologne from 1968 to 1976.

In Clouds, Sigmar Polke has created an atmosphere of time, myth, and transfiguration based on a beguiling allegory of the power of art to transform reality, and even to save one's life.

After a period of surrealist figurative painting in his native Japan in the 1950s, On Kawara shifted his focus to the recording of time in paintings that bear the date on which they are created. The alphanumeric structure of month, number, and year (or number, month, and year, depending on where you are) is as powerful as it is ubiquitous, and no amount of exposition could equal a date's functional and symbolic significance.

The Kota and related peoples preserved the relics of honored ancestral leaders in baskets guarded by reliquary figures. Affixed to the baskets, the figures were carved from a single piece of wood and covered in metal.

When a new king of a Yoruba satellite kingdom was installed, the paramount Yoruba king, the Oni of Ife, had to be assured that all the prescribed kingship rituals had been performed and that he had the new ruler’s allegiance. Some scholars think the transfer of rule in these instances was officially recorded on a wreathlike ring.

This helmet mask appeared in the men’s lipiko, a public masquerade that was still being staged in the 1990s to celebrate the reentry of Makonde males and females into the community after they completed the coming-of-age rituals in their respective bush schools.

The central figure on this rare carved ivory pendant is distinguished by his placement, his slightly larger size, and the large bead at the center of his chest. He is the hereditary king, or oba, of Benin and wears the bead of kingship— an imported red coral, jasper, or agate bead.

In the 16th century, following the death of his father Oba Ozolua, Prince Esigie of Benin City challenged his half-brother Prince Arhuanran, “a man of giant stature” and ruler of Udo, over the leadership of the Benin kingdom and its center. Esigie defeated Arhuanran in the fierce battle of Okuo-Ukpoba or Battle of Blood to become the oba of the kingdom and its capital Benin City.

The Senufo peoples consult diviners (sando), who invoke nature spirits to determine the cause of and remedy for an illness or misfortune. These ambiguous nature spirits (madebele)—believed to live in the forest (or “bush” as it is commonly called), fields, and streams surrounding Senufo villages—both cause and cure misfortune.