EUGENE–Henry John Drewal, renowned scholar of the arts, culture and history of Africa’s Yoruba people, will deliver a free slide-illustrated lecture on Tuesday, April 20, as the Oregon Humanities Center’s 1998-99 Luther S. and Dorothy Cecelia Cressman Professor in the Humanities.

His lecture, "Celebrating Ancestors, Shaping Community: Yoruba Egungun Masquerades in Africa and Brazil," will be presented at 7:30 p.m. in the Conference Room of the Bean West Residence Hall on East 15th Avenue, opposite the University of Oregon Museum of Natural History. A reception, book signing and sale will follow at the natural history museum, 1680 E. 15th Ave.

An endowment given by the late Northwest archaeologist and UO professor emeritus Luther Cressman and his wife, Cecelia established the lectureship in 1997 to present and illuminate fundamental humanities issues that confront but are too often ignored by societies centrally occupied with science, technology, and business.

Drewal, the Evjue-Bascom Professor of African and Africa Diaspora Art at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, received both his master’s and his doctoral degrees in art history from Columbia University. He has spent many years in West Africa and Brazil, studying the Yoruba-speaking peoples. In 1965 and again in 1978, he was apprenticed to master Yoruba sculptors.

Drewel is the author, co-author or editor of several books and numerous articles on Yoruba and African arts. His most recent project is a major travelling exhibition and book/catalogue, "Beads, Body and Soul: Art and Light in the Yoruba Universe."

Recently, Drewel conducted research, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and Fulbright grants, dealing with Afro-Brazilian arts as agents for social change.

The Cressman lecture will occur in conjunction with the current major exhibit at the Museum of Natural History, "Masks, Music and Motion: Community Healing Among the Yoruba of West Africa." That exhibit will continue through June 20.

The term Yorubaland describes an area inhabited by an estimated 15 million people loosely linked by religion, history, language and geography. Primarily in southwestern Nigeria, the Yoruba homeland extends across the border of Benin to the west, and into the Niger River delta to the east.

For more information about this year’s Cressman lecture, browse http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~humanctr or call (541) 346-3934.

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