For more than a century, art historians, dealers, and other connoisseurs have identified some art from West Africa as Senufo.

Why? What does the term Senufo convey about art?

Mapping Senufo focuses on arts commonly labeled as Senufo from an area known as the three-corner region because it is where the present-day borders of Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, and Mali come together in West Africa.

Mapping Senufo is an ongoing initiative that aims to:

  1. visualize time- and place-based information about specific arts and about knowledge of the arts;
  2. reveal new possibilities for analyzing histories of art and the production of knowledge; and
  3. generate fresh questions for study of arts that move beyond cultural or ethnic group classifications.