TheEthiopians harari art's from prehistoric times to the present day. many instances, art production has been related to ritual or tribal ceremonies, as well as serving more secular decorative functions, but it is not always easy to determine the function of a particular work. It is also problematic to label as 'art' the productions of African craftspeople who frequently considered their work as an essential part of secular or religious life. In many tribes, the artist had a high status, but the artist would not necessarily have been the equivalent of the western fine artist who relied on patronage or the marketplace to regulate his or her production. With these strictures in mind, it is possible to isolate different areas and different practices of African art. From c 7000 BC rock drawings include representations of animals and hunters. From the beginning of tribal differentiation, tribal art has become a way of isolating one tribe from another, and tribal art can take the form of scarification, body painting or sculptural masks used in religious ceremonies.
"Such diversity also appears in separate geographical regions, where natural resources
"In the 19th and 20th centuries, African art was 'discovered' by Western colonizers and embraced by modernist artists for its lack of pretension and exciting formal qualities. With the Westernization of much African society, 'traditional' art has become commercialized and sold as souvenirs, while from the 1920s, the growth of African art colleges in more modernized sections of Africa has led a number of African artists to adopt western influences in their work."
