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Implementation of a traveling museum exhibition on the trade network that linked West Africa, the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe from the eighth to the sixteenth century.

The traveling exhibition Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Medieval Trans-Saharan Exchange will reshape perceptions of the medieval past by looking at this era from the perspective of West Africa. It will reveal the global interdependencies that bourgeoned across a vast network of exchange, with West African gold as the primary impetus. Desire for gold drove movement across the Sahara Desert, and provided avenues for amassing wealth and power, fueling the rise and fall of empires. Organized by the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, free and open to the public, the exhibition will open in January 2019, and travel to three additional venues through December 2020, including the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. The exhibition comprises over 250 objects, including sculptures, paintings, jewelry, manuscripts, and archaeological fragments, many of which are on loan for the first time from sites in Mali, Morocco, and Nigeria.