 Hi, I'm Janet Purdy. I'm a third year PhD student at Penn State, and I focus on African art history, specifically architecture of the East African Swahili coast. And my dissertation is actually about carved wooden doors, which is why it's perfect that I get to talk to you about a carved wooden door today. This door actually is from West Africa, from the Kiti region of Nigeria, and the culture is called Yoruba. And the carver, I know it's kind of unusual to actually know the artist's name when we're dealing with African art. But we do know this is actually one of the premier wood carvers of the 20th century. And his name is Aryogun. He's from a town called Osi Ilarum, so he's known as Aryogun of Osi Ilarum. And he was born about 1880, and he died in 1954. So he lived a nice long life, to 74 years. And he was masterful. He was well known. He was sought after. And he apprenticed for almost 20 years under another carver before he went out on his own. In the Yoruba culture, wood carvers, they worked under workshops as apprentices, kind of like ateliers in Europe. So there would be a master head wood carver, such as Aryogun. And then he would have many apprentices who would do various parts of his work. So they, the wood carvers, they focus on daily life. That's the imagery that you'll see in every object that wood carvers work on, from a chair to a comb, to a door like this, which would have been on a chief's house. They also carve a lot of Miranda posts that would go and be in front of these doors. So these are the kind of the best known commissions that we're going to look at. But they're still very representative of every kind of wood carving that you're going to see from every level of wood carver. Like I said, they focus on everyday life, scenes that show transformation, scenes that show such as this. This is a common being where you see couples having intercourse. You see a soldier with a prister. And Aryogun, he focused on several specific images that he would use over and over again across his work in different, in different combinations. This one, you're going to see if there's a horse, maybe if you have to zoom in, but here's the horse's head. And you can see the armor on the horse. And then that's a king riding the horse carrying a gun. That's also a common theme. Then down here at the bottom, this woman in the center, in most Yoruba art, there is a lot of focus on fertility and motherhood and passing along traits to the next generation, which we're also going to see here, this baby, feeding from the mother's breast. And then on the far right, this is also a common image that you'll see across Yoruba art, which is a woman giving an offering to her deity or patron saint. And in the Yoruba culture, almost everyone follows a specific patron saint that's related to their history and their family as they are. It's been passed down or sometimes it comes to them in a vision. It depends on their profession. Yogun, which is built into this artist's name, Aryogun, is the patron saint of blacksmiths and woodcarvers. So a lot of this imagery that you see around the edges, like the crosshatching and the chevrons, that's also built in just to give vitality and energy to the piece and then to divide the registers as well. So you may realize too that a lot of African woodcarved objects do not have pigment on them. And unfortunately, that's not the case when they're used and when they're created. The pigment is really important, really prevalent and an important part of the activity and the power of each piece provided by the artist and then renewed every year. But we can see some of that renewal right here with these drips, can't we? Yeah, and up here you can see it right here too. You can see the different layers. So quite often the pigments are mixed in with an oil. There's an oil called palm oil that comes from palm trees and quite often ochre or camwood in West Africa, they're mixed or kiln, they're mixed with this palm oil and applied to the wood. So it's partly for protection of the piece, but it's also protection of the person that owns the piece. And so the renewal of color, the reapplication of color reactivates the power of the piece and the purpose of the piece. So sometimes it's done during a ceremony or at an important turning point, that's why it's constantly reapplied. So a lot of this pigment or layers of oil are removed when objects come to the Western market because there was this preconceived notion that these African wooden objects should be pure or more modern if they were plain. Right. So in the Yoruba culture color, the color itself does have meaning blue, which actually does not appear here, is the most important color in the Yoruba culture. But red is also signifies, it depends on the region, but usually power or danger and more frequently danger. Well that would make sense with this gun here being depicted in red. And then it also makes sense if you see red is on the frame, so red is containing the entire image. And so it's not a sense of danger, I mean I think that makes perfect sense to have it associated with the gun, but red also is a sense of danger as in it protects this piece from danger from the outside. So the elements that are used here, we know this is red ochre, we know this is yellow ochre, and it could be a combination of yellow ochre and kaolin, which when it's untreated it has a kind of a, it turns to a yellow hue when it's mixed with oil. I don't know what the green is, what did you think it maybe was? Maybe a malachite or it's too bright to be greener. When they use white it's a chalk, and then when they use black it's turquoise, and when it's blue it's indigo. Okay and so they're generally using non, they're not using synthetic things, they're all earth based, yeah. So it's probably malachite.