The Aesthetics of Ashé in Art - Introduction
Arturo Lindsay © 2006

The Yoruba assess everything aesthetically—from the taste and color of a yam to the qualities of a dye, to the dress and deportment of a woman or man. An entry in one of the earliest dictionaries of their language, published in 1858, was "amewa," literally 'knower of beauty,' 'connoisseur,' one who looks for the manifestation of pure beauty.

Robert Farris Thompson, Col. John Trumbull Professor of the History of Art at Yale University

Introduction

The Yoruba are an ethnic group of semi-autonomous kingdoms loosely identified by a common worldview and language residing in the southwestern region of Nigeria and parts of Benin Republic and Togo. The trans-Atlantic slave trade dispersed the Yoruba people—and their religion, aesthetic principles, and culture—to America, where it took root in Brazil, Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, Barbados, Venezuela, Haiti, St. Lucia, and the United States. Despite the ravishes of pre-colonial wars in Yorubaland, the horrors of the slave trade, and its aftermath, Yoruba belief systems survived—albeit in creolized form—in its Diaspora.

Indeed, as Sheila S. Walker, Former Cosby Chair, Humanities and Social Sciences, Professor, Director, African Diaspora and the World Program, Spelman College, demonstrated in a recent lecture at Colgate University, the culture that Yoruba slaves brought to the new world not only survived—it profoundly impacted other enslaved Africans and their descendants, leading to a "Yoruba-ization" of the African Diaspora. Today the Yoruba Diaspora is growing and flourishing in many other parts of America and in Europe. Seminal to this group’s religious belief is the idea that all things, animate and inanimate, are vested with a life force known as ashé.