The Art of Weapons

On view since late April, this exhibition explores the Hood Museum of Art's extraordinary collection of African weapons for the first time. It focuses on the aesthetic quality of the objects, and on the ways in which they reflect notions of masculinity, warriorhood, and ideal male beauty in traditional African societies. Because the weapons are in a Western museum's collection, the exhibition also considers Western notions of masculinity, as represented in the collecting practices of those Christian missionaries, colonial administrators, military officers, big game hunters, and explorers who acquired most of these weapons in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries.

View the official website.

Ceremonial axe  -  Songye, D.R. Congo

Shield  -  Nuer, Sudan

Images and information courtesy of the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College