Face of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americas is an introduction to a brand-new field in art history: the comparative study of Afro-Atlantic altars. Tracing icons and philosophies in altar-making from major African civilizations to the Americas, the book restores many works of art, long considered in isolation from each other, to their original constellating power. Face of the Gods is based on the twenty-five years of fieldwork by Robert Farris Thompson, Professor of the History of African and African-American Art at Yale University in both Africa and the Americas—in Mali, Ghana, Benin, Nigeria, Zaire, the Central African Republic, Angola, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, on the eastern side of the Atlantic, and in Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Suriname, the United States, Brazil, and Argentina, on the western. The book shows how Africans and their descendants in the three continents worship not only before points of reverence, foci of sacrifice and prayer, but also, in certain areas, through sacred happening climaxed by possession. In the Afro-Atlantic world the concept “altar” is double: fixed (tree, fire, stone, dais) and moving (ring shouts, dancing, handclapping, circling, ecstasy), leading ultimately to visitation by healing spirits under God.

Exhibition catalogue by Robert Farris Thompson with Foreword by K. Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau. Chapters by author: Overture: The Concept “Altar”; Tree, Stone, Blood, and Fire: Dawn of the Black Atlantic Altar; A Chart for the Soul: The Kongo Atlantic Altar; The Face of the Past: Staff Shrines and Flag Altars; With the Assurance of Infinity: Yoruba Atlantic Altars; Envoi: The Place of Belief and the Site of Transformation. Published and distributed by The Museum for African Art and Prestel, Munich, September 1993. 336 pp. Cloth: 3-7913-1281-2 , Paper: 0-945802-13-7 [OUT OF PRINT]. LCCN: 93-078261.