High Museum to Present Ancient Nubian Art

The High Museum of Art in Atlanta will present “Ancient Nubia: Art of the 25th Dynasty from the Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston” from June 2 to September 3.

The exhibition will be presented on the Second Level of the High’s Anne Cox Chambers Wing and feature more than 200 masterworks drawn from MFA Boston’s vast holdings, now the largest and most comprehensive collection of ancient Nubian art and material culture outside of Africa.

For more than 3,000 years, a series of kingdoms flourished along the Nile Valley south of ancient Egypt in the Nubian Desert of modern-day Sudan. The works in the exhibition highlight the skill, artistry, and innovation of Nubian makers and reflect the wealth and power of their kings and queens, who once controlled one of the ancient world’s largest empires. 

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“Not only are the objects in this exhibition beautiful examples of artistic achievement, but they also underscore the incredible power and influence of kingdoms that were for many years misunderstood and underappreciated in their historical significance,” said Randall Suffolk, Nancy, and Holcombe T. Green, Jr., director of the High. “We are grateful for the opportunity to help tell this story and to share works with our audience from regions of Africa not extensively represented in our own collection.”

The exhibition will focus exclusively on a later period of ancient Nubian history, the Napata Empire (750-332 BCE), during which Nubia took its place as a world superpower.

It will include rare artifacts from Napata temples and royal cemeteries, including skillfully crafted pottery, gold and silver amulets, jewelry of royal women, dozens of funerary figurines, and statues of kings.

More than a dozen plaques featuring cartouches of Egyptian hieroglyphics will also be on view. Together, the objects illustrate Napata’s spiritual significance and its military and artistic distinction as the center of power during an important period of Nubian history. 

“This exhibition aims to be corrective,” said Lauren Tate Baeza, the High’s Fred and Rita Richman curator of African art. “Responding to previous generations of historians and archaeologists who presented racial biases as fact, it seeks to counter colonial-era misattributions of ancient Sudanese artistic and scientific prowess to their neighbors and the lasting relative erasure of early Sudanese civilizations from the canon of ancient history.”