Africa’s oldest cities, this work represents Sogolon, mother of Sundiata, founder of the Mali Empire. Along with this work, a Qu’ran (ca. 1600) from Timbuktu, Djenne’s sister city, highlights art of the Mali Empire, one of the largest and most important kingdoms the world has ever known. American Art The Museum’s American art collection includes more than 1,200 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints made by American artists between 1780 and 1980. With particular strengths in historic American sculpture and painting, the collection demonstrates the evolution of a distinctly American point of view in artistic representation. From early American portraiture to the splendor of the Gilded Age, the High’s nineteenth-century collection includes works by John Singleton Copley, Benjamin West, Eastman Johnson, Sanford Robinson Gifford, Frederick Kensett, John Henry Twachtman, Harriet Hosmer, Edmonia Lewis, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Mary Cassatt, and John Singer Sargent. The High also holds works by America’s most progressive artists of the modern age, from the Stieglitz Circle and abstract painters, to artists concerned with social justice and reform, to those rooted in the American art scene. Decorative Arts and Design The decorative arts and design collection explores the merging of function and aesthetics through form, material, process, place, and intent. It features the renowned Virginia Carroll Crawford Collection—the most comprehensive survey of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American decorative arts in the southeastern United States—with important works by Alexander Roux, Herter Brothers, Tiffany & Co., and Frank Lloyd Wright. Other notable gifts include the Frances and Emory Cocke Collection of English Ceramics from 1640 to 1840. The collection’s international contemporary design holdings recently have expanded with the addition of significant works by Joris Laarman Lab, Jaime Hayon, Ron Arad, and nendo. With more than 2,300 objects dating from 1640 to the present, the collection explores the intersections between art, craft, and design; handcraft and technology; and innovation and making. European Art This collection represents seven centuries of artistic achievement throughout Europe. The High’s holdings of more than 1,000 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper span the 1300s through the 1900s and trace the development of religion, scientific discovery, and social change through the lens of the continent’s visual culture. In 1958, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation donated what became the core of the High’s European art collection. The Kress Collection includes Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna and Child, Vittore Carpaccio’s Prudence and Temperance, and other artworks from Renaissance and Baroque Europe.