Ikenga, inc., Contact

IKENGA is a gallery of African art dedicated exclusively to museum grade artifacts, located at the east end of Las Olas Boulevard in Ft. Lauderdale.
The gallery collaborates with art galleries, museums, universities, assesses collections, and if desired, recommends acquisitions.
The involvement with museum grade African Art is not for the timid. It demands passion, persistency, integrity, and a vast practical and theoretical knowledge of Africa, its cultures, people, and their art. It takes many years to become a respected, and trusted member in a small, highly selective, and exacting community of African art afficionados.
Exceptional pieces of African (art) works are distinguished not exclusively by their age, but by the power of their esthetic expression. Such artifacts are not easily found, and they are certainly not readily picked up in Africa and shipped abroad “ by the container”.
Wealthy people across the United States have accumulated high quality artifacts in small, private collections. Many exceptional pieces reside in such collections, and become available as a consequence of death or other changing circumstances . Bills and data of acquisition are often lost or misplaced. I specialize in finding these pieces, and offer them to my customers at unrivaled prices, due to the lack of detailed documentation.
All of our artifacts are genuine, authentic, and of exceptional quality. We make statements regarding age, and or provenance only if this can be substantiated.
Accordingly we provide spectroscopic tests, performed by the Museum of Art and Science in Milano, in Italy, to determine the age of selected valuable wooden artifacts. If our pieces should fail to meet with our customers approval, we will readily accept returns.
I count major collections, as well as well known African art galleries from New York, Los Angeles, Brussels, Amsterdam, Paris and London, to my regular customers.
Christa and Anthony Ellison spent many years traveling across Africa. Anthony has worked in 14 different African countries while with the United Nations. Both have
supplemented their practical knowledge of Africa with extensive studies.
Christa has worked for foundations, private collectors, museums, and universities. She served as curator at the MUSEUM OF ART FORT LAUDERDALE, in Fort Lauderdale in the fall of 2002 for the African art exhibition: ”Myth, Mask, and Magic.”
The Museum also showed several pieces of Anthony’s and Christa’s YORUBA collection.