The Archive

A European painting gets a name, a date, a life. Everything else gets a people. “Egyptian.” “Maya.” “Benin culture.” The maker erased, the taking unspoken. This Archive is real work, real objects, drawn from The Met and the Art Institute of Chicago, and put back the way it should have been kept. Named. Dated. Told true. Africa first, the heart of it, and the same care carried out to the whole world.

Where the museum names only a people, we keep the maker. Where it hides how a thing was taken, we say so.

Read what Scry believes →The Taking: what was looted →

The Archive, curated by Anthony Azekwoh

Africa

The heart of the Archive. Court, shrine, and city, from the oldest sculpture in West Africa to the living tradition.

The Benin BronzesBrass and ivory cast for the Oba’s court of the Kingdom of Benin, from the sixteenth century on. Among the finest metalwork ever made. Looted in 1897.Open the collection →IfeNaturalistic brass and terracotta heads from the Yoruba city of Ife, made around the twelfth to fifteenth century. They ended the lie that such likeness was beyond African hands.Open the collection →YorubaSculpture, beadwork, and masks from the Yoruba peoples of present-day Nigeria and Benin, a living tradition with centuries of depth behind it.Open the collection →NokTerracotta figures from central Nigeria, made roughly 900 BC to AD 200. The oldest known sculpture in West Africa, and proof of how far back the record goes.Open the collection →IgboMasks, figures, and ritual objects from the Igbo peoples of southeastern Nigeria, made for the shrine, the masquerade, and the everyday.Open the collection →DogonWood figures and masks from the Dogon of Mali, carved along the Bandiagara cliffs, holding cosmology, ancestry, and the dead.Open the collection →AsanteGold, brass weights, and royal regalia from the Asante kingdom of present-day Ghana, the wealth and craft of a court the British set out to break.Open the collection →

Egypt & the Ancient World

The Nile and the lands between the rivers, where the first cities and the first records were made.

Ancient EgyptThree thousand years of art from the Nile. Tomb and temple, gods and the dead, a civilisation that built to outlast time and did.Open the collection →Faiyum Mummy PortraitsNaturalistic painted faces on Roman-era Egyptian mummies, first to third century. Among the most lifelike portraits to survive from the ancient world.Open the collection →MesopotamiaAssyrian and Babylonian relief and object from the land between the Tigris and Euphrates, where the first cities rose.Open the collection →

Greece & Rome

The body, the vase, the face in marble. The canon the West built its eye on.

Greek VasesBlack- and red-figure painted pottery from ancient Greece. The figure drawing of the ancient world, kept on clay.Open the collection →Classical SculptureGreek and Roman marble and bronze. The canon of the body the West built its eye on, and never stopped measuring against.Open the collection →Roman PortraitsUnidealised marble heads of real Romans. No flattery, no smoothing. The face exactly as it was.Open the collection →

Asia

Ink, bronze, and woodblock across China, Japan, and the subcontinent, dynasty after dynasty.

Japanese PrintsUkiyo-e woodblock prints of the Edo period. Hokusai and Hiroshige’s floating world, pressed sheet by sheet.Open the collection →Chinese PaintingInk and brush across the dynasties. Landscape, figure, and the long unbroken line of the tradition.Open the collection →Buddhist SculptureBuddhas and bodhisattvas across Asia, in stone, bronze, and wood. The same calm carried through a thousand years and many hands.Open the collection →South AsiaHindu and Buddhist art of India and the subcontinent. Deities and temple sculpture, dense with meaning and made to be read.Open the collection →

The Islamic World

The written word as the highest art, with the tile, the miniature, and the page beside it.

Persian PaintingPersian miniature and manuscript painting. Courtly, poetic, jewel-fine, every page worked at the scale of a hand.Open the collection →Islamic CalligraphyThe written word as the highest art of the Islamic world. Sacred and ornamental, the letter raised to the level of the icon.Open the collection →Iznik CeramicsOttoman blue-and-white and polychrome tile and pottery from Iznik, in present-day Turkey. The cool fire of a court at its height.Open the collection →

The Americas

Stone, gold, and jade from Mesoamerica and the Andes, much of it made before 1521.

AztecMexica stone sculpture and ritual object from the empire of Tenochtitlan, in present-day Mexico, made before 1521.Open the collection →MayaStelae, ceramics, and jade from the Maya cities of Mesoamerica. A writing people, who kept their own record before it was burned.Open the collection →Andes & IncaTextiles, gold, and ceramics of the Andes. Inca, Moche, Nazca, Chimú, the work of empires the Spanish came to melt.Open the collection →

Oceania

Carving and mask from New Guinea, Polynesia, and Melanesia, made for the spirit and the sea.

Oceania & the PacificCarving, mask, and object from New Guinea, Polynesia, and Melanesia. Made for the spirit, the ancestor, and the long crossing.Open the collection →