Welcome to my timeline of Wooden Yoruba Art!

Oftentimes African Art is conglomerated in ways that drastically reduce its meaning. For instance, even the dataset that I worked on for this project – Williams College Museum of Art –  was composed of hundreds of works that stretched across mediums, materials, and most consequentially regions and cultures. It is of course amazing to see such a wide variety of African Art from across every inch of the continent, but there comes a point in which generalizing all African Art under a monolith waters down the complexities of each culture’s art. To circumvent this, I chose to display the evolution of wooden Yoruba Art from the 19th and 20th centuries. This whittled my search from about 400 pieces in the WCMA’s dataset to twelve. Without further ado, I present to you my timeline of Yoruba Art utilizing Timeline JS:

Sources: Mentioned above, I utilized the WCMA’s vast collection of African Art for this project. I was hyperspecific in what I wanted to present, which brought down the amount of data to choose from heavily. The data source given to me was in csv form. Because the data was inherently messy and there was a lot more information than I needed, I utilized Open Refine to clean up and organize the data. Then, I put my new data in a new and improved Google Sheet for the next step of the project.

Process: The data that I collected from the WCMA provided links to the page on the WCMA’s official website. This was pivotal for gathering images, understanding who provided the works, and additional context. Each image I gathered came from links that I had to engineer in order to actually present the artworks. This was a process of inspecting the image element, and then identifying each artwork’s database number ID. From there I used the format: https://egallery.williams.edu/apis/iiif/image/v2/<ID_NUMBER>/full/full/0/default.jpg

Presentation: It was important to me to show the evolution of wooden Yoruba Art over time as accurately as I could given the information available to me. This was harder than I had anticipated because many works were labeled with the same titles, and the dates were not very specific at all. For instance, there were multiple artworks that were dated “19th to 20th century”. As we know, that is a 200 year range that leaves a lot of information. I chose to continue my display with educated guesses gathered from when items were collected and by doing some digging into cultural traditions for the Yoruba people. This timeline may not be entirely accurate, but I tried my best.

Significance: It is hard to make meaningful representations of data when the data being represented is not intentionally gathered. This is a problem that stretches across most museums and how they represent Non-Western Art in general. By not putting care into how African Art is represented (i.e giving multiple items the exact same titles and not narrowing any of the established dates on any work), a narrative is supported that positions African Art as stagnant. It also reduces art across cultures into one monoculture that is not accurate. I tried my best with the data I was given, and after finishing this project I wondered if this was not the right kind of data for what I had in mind. With all of that negativity out of the way, I will say that this project was very fun. Any time that I can look at art I am happy, and making a website is one of my favorite things to do as well. Overall, this project was a cool experience, and I am excited about all the new skills I have learned since the beginning of this class!