York's Shona Gallery
The
Blog
Stories of the artists and peoples behind the work: the sculptors, tribes, and traditions that have shaped our collection.
Pfungwa Dziike
Pfungwa Dziike was born in 1975 in Harare and began sculpting in the late 1990s, studying under established Shona artists before finding his own formal language. The name Pfungwa, meaning...
The Senufo Tribe
The Senufo are an agricultural people of the savannah zone of northern Côte d'Ivoire, southern Mali, and western Burkina Faso. Their culture is organised around the Poro, a male initiation...
The Fang Tribe
The Fang are a Bantu-speaking people of Gabon, southern Cameroon, and Equatorial Guinea, inhabitants of the great equatorial rainforest of Central Africa. They are known across the world for producin...
The Baule Tribe
The Baule are an Akan people of central Côte d'Ivoire, descended from a group that migrated west from the Ashanti kingdom of present-day Ghana in the mid-18th century. Their founder,...
The Makonde Tribe
The Makonde are an ethnic group indigenous to the Mueda Plateau of northern Mozambique and the Ruvuma region of southern Tanzania. Renowned across the world for their exceptional woodcarving tradition...
The Dogon Tribe
The Dogon are an ancient people of the Bandiagara Escarpment in Mali, a 500-kilometre sandstone cliff rising dramatically above the plains of the Niger bend. They settled here, in cliff-face...