As African artists began catering to a new market of middle-class urban Africans and foreigners, new art-making practices developed.

Art plays a central role, particularly in oral societies, as a way to remember and heal. Nevertheless, one way people made sense of these changes was through art and performance. In addition, as imported manufactured goods entered local economies, hand-made objects like ceramic vessels and fiber baskets were replaced by factory-made containers.

The introduction of Christianity and the spread of Islam in the 19th and 20th century also transformed many African societies and many traditional art practices associated with indigenous religions declined. Resistance to colonial rule grew steadily and between 19, 47 nations achieved independence but even with independence the problems associated with the slave trade and colonialism remained.

These objects are too often seen in opposition to work produced today using Western materials and conventions by artists who are engaged in a global discourse and who make works of art to be sold. For them, pre-colonial objects have an aura of an untainted, timeless past when artists only made artworks for their own communities unaffected by the outside world. Implicit in the use of the word traditional is the assumption that the art which it describes is static and unchanging.” Many collectors and museum professionals place far greater value on African objects created prior to colonization. Usually this refers to “indigenous art traditions that were viable and active prior to the colonization of Africa by European powers in the late nineteenth century. Nevertheless, in the Western art market and in academia, there exists the concept of “traditional” African art. And logically African art is dynamic and has changed in form, function, and meaning over time. African cultures never existed in isolation-there was always movement, trade, and the exchange of ideas.

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