African Tarot — Victoria Iva
This one is printed on 350gsm art paper with a linen finish, which is the upgrade over the plain-finish stock most decks in this price range use. Linen texture means the cards separate cleanly instead of sticking, resist the fingerprint smudging that plagues glossy decks, and hold a crisp edge through repeated professional use.
What you get
- 78 cards, standard tarot size, 4¾" x 2¾" (120 x 70 mm)
- 350gsm art paper, linen finish, rounded corners
- Full-color companion booklet with a card image, description, symbolism note, and upright and reversed meanings for every card
- Card weight 9 oz (255 g) as published; shipping weight 0.64 lb
- New, factory sealed
- ISBN 9780986089121, Da Brigh Publishing, Raleigh, North Carolina
About the deck
Victoria Iva built the imagery around cubist geometry, with flattened planes, hard color blocking, and figures assembled from angular shapes rather than modeled in the round. Color runs hot throughout, reds and yellows and deep greens against black.
The figures have no faces, only silhouettes filled with pattern. Without an expression to read, you supply the emotional register yourself, and readers who own it report that this pushes more of the work onto intuition than a fully rendered deck does. If you like a card to tell you exactly how the person in it feels, this deck won't do that. If you like room to project, it gives you a great deal of it.
Structurally it's a straight reinterpretation of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. The booklet gives every card a general description, a note on what's happening in this particular image, and separate upright and reversed meanings, with the card reproduced in color alongside. Da Brigh's booklets are written by a professional reader with a doctorate who has been reading since 1992. The publisher also hosts the booklet as a free PDF download.
Provenance & tradition
Da Brigh is an independent tarot publisher in Raleigh, North Carolina, commissioning working illustrators to create new art for classic tarot structures. Victoria Iva is a European graphic illustrator who works across many publishers and also created the Black Tarot for this same house. She names the Northern Renaissance revival as her own tradition.
The system inside it is European Rider-Waite-Smith, unchanged. No African divination tradition is represented here. The publisher's framing is pan-continental, treating Africa as a single visual source rather than as fifty-four countries and many hundreds of distinct artistic and religious traditions. And the cubist approach carries its own history: Picasso, Braque and their Paris circle drew directly on West and Central African mask forms in the early 1900s, largely without credit, working from objects that reached European collections through colonial extraction. A deck that renders African subjects in cubist style is therefore routing those forms back through the movement that borrowed them.
The deck is a well-printed, well-structured, vividly designed Waite-Smith deck by an artist working outside the cultures it references.
Who this is for
Readers who want a Rider-Waite-Smith deck with a bolder graphic palette. Anyone drawn to cubist and mid-century-modern visual design. Readers who prefer faceless or abstracted figures because they leave more room for intuition. Professional readers who need stock that survives a festival weekend. Beginners, since the structure is standard and every card comes with upright and reversed text.
