Master Hand: Individuality and Creativity among Yoruba Sculptors | Explore & Learn

Tradition in Yoruba Art

Our tradition is very modern.

--Yoruba expression

The Yoruba live in Nigeria and the Republic of Benin and are responsible for one of Africa's oldest and most dynamic artistic traditions. Its origins are traced to the ancient city-state of Ile-Ife, famous for exquisitely refined and naturalistic sculptural forms in terracotta and stone created before A.D. 1100. Yoruba cultural heritage now extends to 25 million people of Yoruba descent in other parts of Africa and the Americas--including Brazil, Cuba, Trinidad, Haiti, and the United States--as a consequence of the Atlantic slave trade and diaspora of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

No other African art tradition has empasized the role of the individual artist as much as that of the Yoruba. Information concerning the reputation of Yoruba masters and works attributed to them has been gathered over almost half a century by several generations of scholars. This effort was pioneered in part by William Buller Fagg (1914-1992), former keeper of ethnography at the British Museum. Fagg's studies and documentation of Yoruba sculpture in Nigeria beginning in the late 1950s laid the foundations of the field of study for Western scholars. As that discipline continues to expand, contemporary Yoruba artists and scholars have provided insights into their tradition. One dimension of this involvement is the increasing use of linguistic sources to attain a fuller and more nuanced appreciation of Yoruba aesthetics.

As in all systems of representation, Yoruba visual conventions reflect shared cultural precepts and also afford a language for individual expression. In Yoruba, the term for tradition, asa, is derived from the verb sa, meaning to select, choose, discriminate, or discern. The exceptional artist attains mastery of past conventions and draws upon them as a foundation for provocative departures that are recognized as his or her signature. Consequently, Yoruba "tradition" is conceived as a series of dynamic multilayered practices introduced by individual artists of past and present generations.

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