Body Designs. Perhaps one of the greatest African art forms is the adornment of the human body. Among many West African groups intricately designed jewelry, elaborate hairstyles, body decoration, and elegant attire combine to make human beings, especially women, living works of art. Representing individual, familial, and cultural concepts of beauty, many of these adornments have roots in the 500- 1590 period of West African history.

Body Decoration. For centuries West Africans have turned the human body into living art through tattoos, decorative pigments, and scarification (a process whereby incisions are made in the skin to create patterns). While it is difficult to pinpoint the origins of these forms of body designing, the survival of masks and scriptures that depict such decorations has helped scholars to determine that they date back to antiquity. Permanent body designing such as tattoos and scarification occurs at...