Clear your September calendar - the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston has just announced two major exhibitions.

The Sept. 19 unveiling of Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art in Ancient Nigeria promises to be an important moment in the city's African arts appreciation, as it features 100 extraordinary items currently on view at the British Museum and coincides with the opening of the newly reinstalled African Galleries at the MFAH. London's Guardian places the collection among the paragons of art historical significance along "with the Terracotta Army, the Parthenon or the mask of Tutankhamen as treasures of the human spirit," and The Times declared the exhibition a "once-in-a-lifetime, revolutionary event." Previously the exclusive territory of anthropologists, the sculptures are being exposed to educate and awe public audiences for the first time.

While Europe was entrenched in the figural doldrums of the Middle Ages, Ife flourished with artistic mastery. Made between the 9th and 15th centuries in the ancient Southwest Nigerian city-state, the metal, stone and terra cotta collection illuminates an ancient kingdom, which according to MFAH director Dr. Peter C. Marzio, held artists who "possessed an advanced understanding of human anatomy, proportion and metal-casting, creating artwork that is stylistically similar to European classical art, yet gorgeously original."

The exhibition marks its U.S. debut in Houston before traveling to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the Museum for African Art, New York.

German Impressionist Landscape Painting: Liebermann-Corinth-Slevogt, on display Sept. 12 - Dec. 5, celebrates a generation of German painters who drew upon the stylistic developments in 19th-century France and started a movement that produced a swath of stirring canvases. This exhibition at the MFAH represents the first attempt by an American museum to devote itself entirely to the subject: The 80 paintings (largely light-drenched landscapes) will be fresh off the walls of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud in Cologne.

Art dealer Paul Cassirer labeled the three artists the "Triumvirate of German Impressionism" in 1901 - yet in a stroke of curatorial brilliance, the MFAH exhibition is, to date, the only instance in which their works will be on view side-by-side. Not only does the exhibition communicate the German Impressionists' painterly acumen, it reveals the intricacies of how artistic moods translate across national borders, and as we shall see in September, become singular reflections of the furiously emboldened 1920s Berlin zeitgeist.