TERA Gallery - African Art and Antiquities

"Altering The Way You View The World Of Art"

TERA Gallery is steward of a great collection of African art.

The gallery's holdings are made available to the public through its library,
exhibits, a resident scholars program, and long-term loans in communities
throughout the world.

May the beauty and power, and the art and history you experience in this
collection inspire you and alter the way you view the world of art.

"It doesn't bother me...looking at a piece [of African art] that I don't know the name of the artist.  
I mean I like the object itself enough, that I don't need that kind of information.  Part of my desire
to collect magical, strange objects would be destroyed if I knew it was carved by Mr. X in such
and such a village and [that] he spent so much time carving it.  If I knew the whole process so
exactly, it would take away some of the magic and mystery."

The collector's remarks underscore with crystalline clarity the general assertion that the trade
in African art conceals or, as it were, mystifies the relationship between human labor (both
production and exchange) and its products.  The work of African art thus becomes socially
repressed by a complicity of consumers who destroy in their imagery of the African art object all
traces of production, and, in the end, celebrate the decontexualized results of dehumanized
labor --the mysterious sparkle of the commodity cult.  (Christopher Steiner, African Art in Transit
[Cambridge Studies in Social & Cultural Anthropology. London: Cambridge University Press,
1994], 163.

BY APPOINTMENT ONLY

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