In the history of the history of art in Africa, it seems to me that an interest in textiles was the first major disruption of the stranglehold of sculpture in our understanding of African visual culture and aesthetic values.1 In some localities, indeed, textiles provided the more potent and popular visualization of an indigenous aesthetic: Asante and Ewe are obvious examples; but this could also be argued for Yoruba and Kuba—two obvious cases of powerful sculptural traditions that cannot fully be appreciated in the absence of the arts of textile design and manufacture.
Something like this would be true of any locality in which these two arts, sculpture and textiles, are practiced side by side. Figures 1 and 2—photos taken to document a sculpture by Olowe of Ise, which happen to show a weaver at work in the background—illustrate the problem: two components of a greater Yoruba aesthetic....