Written by Louis Werner, photographed by Michael Nelson
from Saudi Aramco World, July/August 2006 {full article here}
... EVEN MORE DISTINCTIVE than the floor plan of a Nubian house is the decoration of its exterior doorway, or bawaba,
which mixes vivid color, adobe brick filigree, figurative and geometric
images in mud and white lime-plaster relief, and wall-mounted objects
like ceramic plates, automobile headlights, mirrors, cow horns and
dried crocodiles. While the full range of these decorative materials
has shrunk in recent years, the impulse to draw attention to one’s
home, and to its doorway as a symbol of the family, remains strong.
The late art historian Marian Wenzel was a member of a multidisciplinary team that documented Nubian life and culture in the mid-1960’s, before it was submerged by Lake Nasser. Her book House Decoration in Nubia (1972, University of Toronto Press), which applied the methods of art criticism to social anthropology, established the chronology of design motifs and techniques in Upper Nubia during the 20th century. Starting with the supposition that no artwork is anonymous and no folk tradition is truly timeless, she determined that the iconography of Nubian house décor was a 20th-century phenomenon, traceable to the handiwork of a few known builders-turned-artist...
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