Bermuda National Gallery’s Collection of 22 African pieces was purchased in 1996 by a cross-section of the Bermudian community, which included 15 Bermuda schools. The Collection centers on the African contribution, directly and derivatively, to our modern world. In addition, there are ten African pieces that have been gifted to the Gallery by an anonymous donor.

The Gallery’s Collection of African art is a celebration of African creativity, resilience, and the important place of beauty in everyday African life. The objects were made by African artists to celebrate persons, relationships, and values central to their own cultures. The African Collection enables us to understand more about the rich diversity of the African peoples who produced these figures, masks and royal regalia. The Collection speaks to us all, regardless of whether we are of African or some other heritage.

The Gallery’s Collection can be sub-divided into the following areas:
African women – African sculpture is often created and used to celebrate women’s important roles in social life as lovers, wives, mothers and founts of wisdom. Wooden figures representing women also speak to the complementarity of the sexes that underlies conjugal and community harmony. The Gallery’s pieces specifically express and reinforce gender relations, female aesthetic values, and ethical principles of marriage and family.
Ancestors and the Otherworld – A great deal of African art is concerned with the spirit world, and the crucial links between the living and the dead. In many African societies, “eternity” is not a “forever” enjoyed or suffered by the dead in strict seclusion from the living. Rather, communities often include living and ancestral beings, and ancestral spirits possess a jural presence through which they guide and protect their living loved ones. For some, ancestors are reincarnated in grandchildren named after them. For others, ancestral spirits, both specific and generic, may inhabit a particular place created for them in the community or household. Such a shrine or altar is a threshold between the living and the dead, to be traversed in either direction in the course of everyday problem solving and in answer to crises striking the family or community, which is where one often finds “ancestor figures” playing a role.

Leadership and rule – Several works in the Collection belong to realms of political leadership and rule. Much African art is made to honour and celebrate the powers and attributes of rulers, and to express ideological principles of leadership. African systems of social organisation range from highly centralized states ruled by kings, to non-centralised communities led by elders. In precolonial times, centralized rule was accomplished through a complex and well-ordered political bureaucracy. Kingdoms still exist in many parts of Africa, and while some rulers retain substantial authority, many have been reduced to symbolic roles by their national governments. Non-centralised political systems are more democratic, where councils of elders, often representing each family in a community, make decisions about the conduct of life. These wise people lead by example, rather than by intimidation or force.

Animals and nature – Animals are among the most common subjects of African art. Yet despite the great diversity of animal life in Africa, a surprisingly small number of animals are represented over and over again in African art. Some of the beasts (e.g. lions, giraffes, and rhinocerous) that non-Africans may consider “typical” of the country, are rarely, if ever, depicted at all. They simply do not answer an African sense of what is particularly meaningful. Other animals provide metaphors for human strengths and weaknesses by acting in ways that are remarkably, and sometimes frighteningly, “human”.
African resilience – Most of the African works of art owned by the Gallery celebrate African traditions. However, the African interpretation of the word “tradition” refers to a dynamic, living process combining continuity and change. Africans consider tradition something that they choose to remember and use from the past, and it is something that is “creatively, actively, intentionally selected and constructed, not thoughtlessly preserved and repeated.” The Gallery’s resilience Collection includes a number of objects that effect and reflect creative transformations in precolonial, colonial and contemporary life.

The complete Collection was last displayed in 1996.