Ongoing Exhibition - Ends May 10
Metropolitian Museum of Art - New York, NY
Exhibition opens: Jan 29, 2020
From the first millennium, the Sahel—a vast area in Africa just south of the Sahara Desert that spans what is today Senegal, Mali, Mauretania, and Niger—was the birthplace of a succession of influential polities. Fueled by a network of global trade routes extending across the region, the empires of Ghana (300–1200), Mali (1230–1600), Songhay (1464–1591), and Bamana (1640–1861) cultivated an enormously rich material culture.
Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shores of the Sahara will be the first exhibition of its kind to trace the legacy of those mighty states and what they produced in the visual arts.