Search Results

Some African peoples have rich traditions of furniture, almost all of which is made of wood and in the main out of single pieces. While no African household completely lacks furniture of some sort, large wooden objects are, for obvious reasons, scarce among nomadic peoples and in communities where villages are relocated at intervals.

In Africa the stool is the most basic item of furniture. A man’s stool is extremely personal to him, as well as being a status symbol. There are some examples, for example from Liberia, of stools of composite construction made from palm-rib pieces. Generally, however, African stools are made from a section of tree trunk. There is considerable stylistic variation in African stools, both between peoples and between those used by chiefs or elders and those used by commoners. That of an important person may be distinguished by the number of legs, by the elaboration of its carving or by its ornamentation with beadwork, metal plate or brass studs. For example, in northern ...

Large box container with a hinged lid. When the lid is domed, or if the chest is reinforced, it can also be known as a coffer. Chests are among the earliest furniture types and commonly served in ancient Egyptian homes as storage for clothing, linen and valuables. The shape and size of these chests often depended on their function. Some types, which could be quite complex, were known during the Old Kingdom (c. 2575–c. 2150 bc) and survived virtually unchanged over the succeeding centuries. The ancient Egyptian chest comprised a rectangular box supported on legs and covered by a lid, which could be flat, gabled, domed or sloping. Cords wound around projecting knobs on the lid and side of the chest held it closed; if necessary, this fastening could be sealed with a lump of mud for greater security. Favoured materials for making chests include native acacia and ...

(b Karentaba, 1954).

Senegalese painter and furniture designer. He graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure d’Education Artistique and the International School of Art and Research, Nice. He taught at the Ecole Nationale des Arts and in 1997 was president of the National Association of Fine Arts, Senegal, as well as a member of the Economic and Social Council of Senegal. In the 1980s his ‘dense and emotive’ works were figurative and dealt with general issues such as violence. His work of the mid-1990s was made with strips of cotton cloth, fashioned on canvases so as to create areas of three-dimensional relief, and colored with browns and ochres. He also created brightly coloured figurative acrylic pieces on paper. He exhibited in the first (1995) and second (1997) Johannesburg Biennale and at other international shows in Senegal, Russia, Belgium, Switzerland, Burkina-Faso, Argentina, the USA and elsewhere. His furniture designs include a table made from old machinery parts, gears, hoes and glass, which was included in Dak’Art ’98. In the late 1990s he was considered one of Senegal’s pre-eminent artists....

Neo-classical style of architectural and interior design; as Egyptomania or Egyptiennerie it reached its peak during the late 18th century and early 19th. Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt (1798) coincided with emerging tastes both for monumental and for richly ornamental forms, enhanced by the literary and associational concerns of Romanticism. Unlike its Greek and Gothic counterparts, the Egyptian Revival never constituted a coherent movement with ethical or social implications. Indeed, since its earliest manifestations occurred in the later Roman Empire, the Revival itself can be seen as one in a series of sporadic waves of European taste in art and design (often linked to archaeological inquiry), acting as an exotic foil to the Classical tradition with which this taste was and remains closely involved (see fig.). On a broader plane of inquiry, the study of Egyptian art and architecture has continued to promote a keen awareness of abstraction in design and a decorative vocabulary of great sophistication. These are among the most enduring contributions of ancient Egypt to Western art and design. ...

American architectural, urban planning, exhibition, and furniture design partnership formed in 1980 by Robert Venturi, John Rauch (b Philadelphia, 23 Oct 1930), and Denise Scott Brown [née Lakofski] (b Nkana, Northern Rhodesia [now Zambia], 3 Oct 1930). Venturi studied architecture at Princeton University, NJ (BA 1947, MFA 1950), and between 1950 and 1958 he worked in various offices including those of Oskar Stonorov, Saarinen, Eero, and Louis Kahn. He also spent a period (1954–6) as Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. In 1957 he joined the staff of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, the start of an extensive teaching career. He was then in partnership with Paul Cope and H. Mather Lippincott (1958–61), with William Short (1961–4) and from 1964 with Rauch, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1957. Denise Scott Brown studied at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (...