Fantastic work.

Very special artwork and information, I agree with wysiwig, about what 'the white' did to the African people.

Well done.

Interesting montage and fine manipulation, BB

Very interesting... great shot and postwork!

What a wonderful piece and a great re-interpretation.

Both images are beautiful! Lovely collage and very interesting information. The horrors perpetuated by the colonialists and their governments on the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo continued until the very recent past. The book "King Leopold's Ghost" by Adam Hochschild is a compelling, gripping and totally horrifying read. I agree with Mark, people are first demonized or stripped of all humanity, to give others the excuse to treat them this way.

What a fantastic piece of work and a wonderful write up accompanying it! I find it amazing that so much of human history, white and otherwise, is so incredibly bloody. It reminds me of a passage from the novel Cryptonomicon that states: ...self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other. It's a flippant, all-too-accurate assessment of what life of earth seems to be...and human societies are no different; in fact, human societies seem to distill that violent urge into a more potent and pure form. Creamy-Pink people (I have yet to see anyone truly "white") from Europe did it to brown people everywhere else, but brown people everywhere have been doing it for centuries as well...to other brown people. They'd have done it to Europeans as well...but Europeans beat them to the draw. It's odd that only in the context of Europeans did skin color actually come into play, and--oh!--what an obsession it is now!...but I suppose that's natural as skin color is the easiest way to determine who is or isn't a member of your family/clan/tribe/nation... ...well...all of this is to say that this is a brilliant post in artistic merit and in anthropological, historical, and even biological significance. It's great to see an acknowledgment of art from the "dark continent" and the people there...especially since brilliant feats of human development actually started in various parts of Africa, from humanity's first examples of iron smelting in the old kingdom of Mali (or somewhere near there) to the architectural marvels (now largely destroyed) of Old Zimbabwe and Dahomey, and other areas. Heck, even the people of Kush built pyramids--kinda skinny ones, because they were built using cranes (but they hadn't quite figured out how to adjust those cranes.) But now as I'm rambling on and on, I'm gonna shut up for now, but I want to say THANK YOU for this post and for every other post you've made and will make.

You did very nice work.

First, your modernist version is very true to the modernist aesthetic, it could be a painting by a European in mid century or between the 1st & 2d World Wars. You've made it like an oil painting, changing the very bold colors of the shield to a more subdued 'european' palette. It also could be a tapestry, with your softened postwork suggesting tufts of one kind or another. A good transformation to western-style treatments. And it makes the point about appropriation and transformation of art... Your commentary is, as always, chock full of background and reflection, and I agree with chip how fine it is to see this kind of art in our galleries (and how finely you've spoken to it). (I see chip has already held down the fort for long comments: Good, lol, I don't feel so alone! And I always get a great deal from reading his, they add to the understanding of your work.) The amazing thing about those curvilinear lines (around eyes, nose, etc), is that they are so deeply organic: They speak of the sheer fact of "resonation"---creating forms in natural resonance with other forms. It's a compilation of visual songs, where the more one entity sings, the more others do in symbiotic response. These resonant lines are not only common in a number of African & Oceanic masks, shields, etc, but are varied from people to people in a way that's wonderful to watch. The lines make an eye an "event," a nose an "event," because all those vectors around them emphasize the island & center that they are. (A celebration of the primacy of the eye, nose, lips, etc.) And the actual eyes, etc, are separated by darker (or lighter) hues, making them islands from which those lines ripple outwards...I'm aware that these lines can have ceremonial significance in various pieces, but, as with the Raffaello, they also display one of the central mindsets of human creativity: The act of celebrating sheer resonance. The energies that emanate from an eye, etc... And yes, those designs overwhelmed early modern artists, who were famished for form-as-art, famished to get away from realism in its many incarnations. And yes---something you know far better than I---they also appropriated these styles, as well as the artworks themselves. When we studied the history of museums, we read one story after the next of appropriation, not just of Western works, but esp non-western works. The plunder & out-and-out thievery & swindles & tiny prices paid for extraordinary works abounded. And they studied them without any reference to the culture from which they came---at least in the earlier days---which encouraged a continued plunder & disdain for their creators. So understand: While I speak of an underlying "expression" that makes us all resonate with basic line, basic design, basic color, etc etc, I also understand that these pieces represented very specific uses & even religious purposes to their creators & to the societies they created them for. All must go hand in hand. And all is contained in your commentary, another painstaking effort on your part. I'll stop here, for now, and return again soon. This is a cumulative series, in that each upload amplifies the last, and we get a repeated sense of what it means to create art, and what it means to take it from its original contexts, and even to find contexts that precede them---like the deep inner contexts of form, color, etc, which are hard to prove but hard to ignore. All suggested & discussed in your work. Wonderful work on all levels.