Kota: Digital Excavations in African Art

This October, Pulitzer Arts Foundation will open Kota: Digital Excavations in African Art, an exhibition that examines a new digital database created by Belgian computer engineer and independent researcher Frederic Cloth to study and reveal the hidden histories of Kota reliquaries. Featuring nearly fifty of these guardian figures, the exhibition will take visitors through a visual process to detect groupings and similarities between the sculptures that will enhance understanding of their origins, creation, and function—information that has largely been considered lost. Co-curated by Cloth and Kristina Van Dyke, a specialist in African art, Kota is the first exhibition to examine Cloth’s search engine and system of algorithms, as well as the first to focus exclusively on Kota reliquaries outside of the broader context of African sculpture. Read more.

Event website