Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa

Caravans of Gold online exhibition showcases the splendor and power of the lost kingdoms and commercial centers of Africa, using centuries-old artifacts from sites around the Sahara Desert and artwork from West and North Africa, Europe and the Middle East that reveal the reach of Saharan networks. It opened as a physical exhibition at The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois in January 2019. It subsequently travelled to the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto and National Museum of African Art in Washington D.C. Presenting more than 250 artworks and fragments spanning five centuries and a vast geographic expanse, the exhibition features loans from partner museums and institutions in Mali, Morocco and Nigeria, including many items that have never been presented in the United States.

The exhibition overturns assumptions about African history and repositions African states and peoples as not only embedded in, but central to global networks of exchange in the medieval world and challenges common notions of Africa as a place isolated from the rest of the world and without history.