The Shape of Belief: African Art from the Dr. Michael R. Heide Collection

by Mary Nooter Roberts, Allen F. Roberts

African art "articulates the unknowable, invisible, and unsayable", comment the authors, who are well known for their writing on this work. In their highly personal essay, they introduce a collection that concentrates on works of art from west Africa, mainly Nigeria.The hand of the maker and its creative dream provide one of the tropes for participating in the works' reality. Similar provocative discussion concerns the ambiguity of the masquerade, the way time collapses when origin myths and cosmology bear on everyday experience, and the paradoxical status of twins.

94 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997