Africa, Oceania and the Indigenous Americas

The Department oversees four separate collection segments: the arts of Africa, Egypt, the South Pacific and the Indigenous Americas. Reflecting current scholarship and geography, Egyptian art is now a sub-section of this department. African art thus consists of works from the rest of Africa other than Egypt.

African Art

The DIA’s African art collection ranks among the finest in the United States. It comprises some rare world-class works from nearly one hundred African cultures, predominantly from regions south of the Sahara desert. A diverse collection, ranging from sculpture to textiles to exquisite utilitarian wares, religious paraphernalia and bodily ornaments, it is heavily weighted toward the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

African art collecting is inextricably tied to the founding of the Detroit Institute of Arts at the turn of 20th century and remains one of the institution’s important hallmarks. From the late 1800s through the 1930s, generous contributions from some of Detroit’s first collectors, such as Frederick Stearns and Robert Tannahill, helped to develop the core collection. This included priceless works, such as several Benin royal brass sculptures, an exquisite 16th century Kongo Afro-Portuguese ivory knife container, a 17th century Owo ivory bracelet, a Kongo steatite funerary figure (ntadi) and a finely crafted Asante royal gold soul-washer’s badge recovered from the chamber of the nineteenth century Asante King, Kofi Karikari. Support from the City of Detroit has since aided the purchase of additional works of