African Odyssey: Exhibit reveals beauty of artifacts and tools in Africans' daily lives

To many people, the objects on display in an African exhibit at SciWorks represent art that is meant to be looked at.

To the people who made the objects, they were useful parts of everyday life, personal items meant to communicate values of ordinary people.

"African Odyssey -- Exploring the Art, Culture and Science of Living" is an exhibit of artifacts mostly from the Wake Forest University Museum of Anthropology. Items include jewelry, clothing, furniture, masks and musical instruments. The objects, all from African countries south of the Sahara Desert, date mostly from the 1800s to the present.

The exhibit also includes ancient tools and fossils from the SciWorks collection, some of which go back almost 2 million years, and a model of a skull found by Mary Leakey. They were discovered in the Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania.

Beverlye Hancock, the exhibit's curator, is retired from the anthropology museum. She said she hopes that visitors to the exhibit will recognize the skill and artistic abilities of Africans and their capacity to make things from their daily lives beautiful. The exhibit is so broad that it can speak to people with many interests, she said.

"I'm partial to various textiles,'' Hancock said. "I think people who perhaps work with wood or are familiar with the properties of working with wood will enjoy the carvings. Potters will be more interested in ceramics. It depends on what an American particularly is interested in that will draw them to those things from Africa."

In Africa, beaded jewelry, certain types of cloth and elaborate head wear could designate age, marital status, wealth, social position and membership in organizations. Certain doors and locks symbolized protection from evil spirits. Decorative masks could be used for initiations into certain societies or to signify grief.

Most items were not made by one person; the creation of them was a group process. Bits of currency in "prestige" metals such as gold, iron and brass were always cast by men, and the work was a family project. They use the lost-wax process to produce the currency, molding each piece from wax, then covering the wax pieces with heated clay. As the wax melted, it left behind an impression in the clay, which workers then filled with molten metal. When the metal cooled, they broke the clay and released the pieces of currency.

Currency crosses on display from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) look like flattened jacks. A thick prestige bracelet decorated with round knobs represents another type of currency. In central Africa in the 16th century, the Shoowa people used cloth made from palm fibers as currency.

Among the most colorful items in the exhibit are wedding outfits worn by the Maasai tribes of Kenya and Northern Tanzania. The outfits included beaded headdresses and beaded circular necklaces that look like bibs. In the Maasai tribes, men are the warriors and herders, and the women build houses, care for livestock and prepare meals.

The exhibit contains many beaded items, including a chest tab made to look like a Western man's tie with colored diamond shapes against a black background. The tab is an "innovation," a modern creation that still pays homage to its cultural heritage.

A thick iron bracelet with rope designs, from Liberia, is on display next to a bigger bracelet made of aluminum, with similar detail. The aluminum bracelet is another innovation.

A hands-on area for children gives them the chance to more fully explore Africa. They can visit a marketplace with a tin roof, where they can create head-wraps and skirts from brightly colored cloth and learn about foods that would be sold in the market, including fish, bananas, corn and fruit. They can play a game of collecting and moving stones, called mankala, that is played in several countries in Africa or bang on a drum made from African wood.

■ "African Odyssey -- Exploring the Art, Culture and Science of Living" will be on display through Aug. 29 at SciWorks, Hanes Mill Road, just off University Parkway or off U.S. 52. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday. For information, visit the Web site www.sciworks.org or call 767-6730.

■ Janice Gaston can be reached at 727-7364 or at jgaston@wsjournal.com.