The Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of African Art in Washington DC, the only museum in the world dedicated solely to the collection, conservation, study, and exhibition of Africa’s arts across time and media, reopened last Friday, July 16. To mark the reopening, a new exhibition titled  “Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange Across Medieval Saharan Africa,” originally scheduled to open in April 2020, is now available to visitors until February 27, 2022.

Featuring over 300 works from the 8th century AD to the 15th century AD, “Caravans of Gold” highlights the global reach of Africa; her people, ideas, and materials during these periods. It also serves as the first major exhibition to explore global medieval Saharan Africa and the pivotal role traders, artists and intellectuals had in bridging connections between West Africa (including modern-day Morocco, Mali, and Nigeria) to places as remote from the Sahara as Italy, Iran, China, and the U.K.

“The exhibition is a landmark opportunity to reconsider our understanding of world history,” said Kevin D. Dumouchelle, curator at the National Museum of African Art. “In this exhibition, African artists, innovators, intellectuals, and traders reclaim their central place in our understanding of a period that laid the foundations for the global early modern world. Africa’s history truly is world history.”

According to information on the Smithsonian Institute’s official website, the exhibition is developed in close collaboration with lending partner institutions in Mali, Morocco, and Nigeria, and the works on displays are comprised of only archaeological works from public collections in Africa, the U.S., or Europe that were legally exported from their country of origin. It also features globally recognized masterworks from national museum collections in Nigeria, Mali, and Morocco, on view to visitors in Washington, D.C., for the first time.

“‘Caravans of Gold’ is the starting point for a new understanding of the medieval past and for seeing the present in a new light,” said Kathleen Bickford Berzock, the exhibition’s organizing curator and associate director for curatorial affairs at Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art. “The legacy of medieval trans-Saharan exchange has largely been omitted from Western historical narratives and art histories, and certainly from the way that Africa is presented in art museums. This exhibition goes a long way to address this. ‘Caravans of Gold’ shines a light on Africa’s pivotal role in world history through the tangible materials that remain.”

In addition to physical visits, the exhibition is available to be viewed online. Furthermore, the exhibition is accompanied by the publication ‘Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time,’ edited by Berzock and co-published by the Block Museum of Art and Princeton University Press. Topics discussed in the publication include descriptions of key medieval cities around the Sahara; networks of exchange that contributed to the circulation of gold, copper, and ivory and their associated art forms; and medieval glass bead production in West Africa’s forest region.