The exhibition titled Caravans of Gold, fragments in time: Art, Culture and exchange across medieval Saharan Africa took place at Block museum of Arts Evanston, from January 26th to July 21,2019.
It also toured Aga Khan Museum in Toronto from September 21,2019 to February 23, 2020. From Canada to National Museum of African Arts at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC from November 19,2020 to July 16th 2021.
Curated by Kathleen Bickford Berzock, Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Block Museum,the exhibition seeks to address the scope of Saharan trade and the shared history of West Africa, the Middle East, North Africa and Europe from the eight to sixteenth century.
It’s also about putting Africa at the center of the world, to better appreciate it.
The exhibition, Caravans of Gold, recaptures the past through surviving traces, to present a critical rethinking of the medieval period. Different excavated materials are juxtaposed side by side to recapture the past and make sense of happenings in time past, with just bits and fragments of objects got from a different era, in some archaeological sites, previously inhabited but now desolate. The aim of the exhibition was to use the fragments, to reconstruct the present, in a new dimension.
Partner institutions and countries in Africa instrumental in loaning objects for the exhibition are National Commission
for Museums and Monuments Nigeria, Mali and Morocco.
On exhibition were more than 250 works of Art, spanning five centuries over a vast geographical expanse cutting across Africa, the Middle East, Europe and the Sahel.
One poignant and most profound part of the exhibition was the story of Mansa Musa, a Malian Emperor and the richest man ever who by the time of his death in 1937, was worth an estimated $300 billion to $400 billion in adjusted dollars for the late 2000s.
The exhibition was a one of it’s kind one that showed the world how interconnected humanity is.