About Mbuti Barkcloth
Men pound the inner bark of six forest tree species into a soft fibrous sheet. Women then draw on it with a twig, a stem or a fingertip — line networks, hatch fields, dotted runs, blotted forms — improvised once and never repeated.
This system takes the sheet as the page: khaki-oatmeal ground, olive-black ink that soaks and feathers into the grain, uneven density on purpose. A crowded corner beside a bare one is the composition, not a mistake to be corrected.
- Origin
- Ituri rainforest, north-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo
- Era
- pre-1900 and continuing; the museum-collected corpus is largely twentieth century
- Key figures
- Mbuti women painters · Efe forest painters · Hamill Gallery · Smithsonian National Museum of African Art
- Movements
- Central African barkcloth · forest-dweller material culture · mid-century Western abstraction
Mbuti Barkcloth design spec
Colors
Typography
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