The Art and Life in Africa Project

Christopher D. Roy, Art and Art History

The Art and Life in Africa Project develops research and teaching materials comprising images of and information about African art objects and the individuals and cultures which created and used them. This past year, support from the National Endowment for the Humanities funded the completion and sales distribution of a CD-ROM, the expansion of a Website http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/, and the training of high-school teachers.

The Art and Life in Africa CD-ROM includes objects from eleven museum collections and field photos and text from thirty-two international scholars. The multi-media material on the CD-ROM is brought to life by more than 10,000 color images of objects and field photos supplemented by video and music clips, essays, and a 1400-entry bibliography. Also included are ethnographies for each of 106 peoples whose art is discussed in the text, 27 ethnographic maps of Africa, statistics and brief histories of each country before and after independence, and a searchable bibliography.

In summer 1998, the project - using the Information Arcade classroom in the UI Library - trained eighty Iowa high school and middle-school teachers to use the CD in their classrooms. Roy and the project's Associate Director, L. Lee McIntyre, discussed the content, organization, and operation of the CD and also held workshops designed to allow the participating teachers to plan classroom applications. Roy notes, "We were impressed this summer with the enthusiasm of the eighty high school teachers for the CD."

"They have been under great pressure from the state Board of Education to include multi-cultural material in their curriculum, and they acted like pirates who had discovered buried gold when they began to use the CD."