A History of Art in Africa is the product of two decades of research and writing by a team of scholars who represent Africanist art historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and other teachers of African visual culture in the United States. Led by Monica Visonà and Robin Poynor, the team includes Herbert M. Cole and Michael D. Harris. The book is intended to be a general undergraduate text on African art and so fills a gap that has plagued Africanists for years. Until recently, they were forced by the lack of such a book to make do with occasional exhibition catalogues and scores of photocopied articles for survey courses on African art. While the situation has improved considerably with the appearance of texts such as Judith Perani and Fred Smith’s The Visual Arts of Africa: Gender, Power, and Life Cycle Rituals (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998) and Christopher Roy and Lee McIntyre’s CD-ROM, Art and Life in Africa: Recontextualizing African Art in the Cycle of Life (Iowa City: The Art and Life in Africa Project, 1998), this book is the most comprehensive African art survey to date. Apart from covering most of the art of the continent, it includes a...