A tribute to Roy Sieber: Part 1.

A great tree has fallen. A mighty tree has been uprooted. Man cannot deny death. We would have saved you, were we able. But death cannot be denied. You go to join the elders. We pray you honor us to them. We pray you block the path of death, That we who are alive shall not die. We will give you a grand funeral.

Akan lamentation for the late Asantehene Sir Osei Agyeman Prempeh II, recorded in the 1973 film A Great Tree Has Fallen, narrated by Roy Sieber

It is an honor to serve as the guest editor of two special issues of African Arts dedicated to Roy Sieber, founder of the discipline of African art history in the United States (Fig. 1), who died September 14, 2001 (see Thompson 2001). When I took on this task, I knew it would be impossible to write an introduction that would pay fitting tribute to a man who was loved and respected by so many and whose scholarly achievements and enormous impact on the field were well known to Africanists worldwide. From the start, though, it was clear to me that the notion of family would guide my approach. All of us who worked closely with Roy knew we were part of the Sieber clan, which encompassed wife and partner Sophie at the helm, and "the kids"--Mark, Thyne, Ellen, and Matt; an extended family of collectors, dealers, colleagues, and friends; and generations of those fortunate enough to have been his students. Therefore, the contributions to these special issues of African Arts are truly a family affair.

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This introduction will provide background on the life and achievements of Roy Sieber, focusing particularly on his early career, the 1950s to about the beginning of the 1980s. In the next issue, I will mention some of his later projects and focus particularly on his lifelong interest in the object as the starting and ending point for art historical inquiry.

Some background seems in order. Sieber was born in 1923 in Shawano, Wisconsin, and the events of his early years seemed to chart the course he was to follow later in life. He demonstrated an early interest in the arts and, as a young boy, must have enjoyed some hometown celebrity, for Sophie reports that "he was the artist of the annual Christmas nativity scene on the lawn of his church each year." He was a member of the high school debating team--a fact Sophie cites as the reason she could never win an argument with him. An only child, Sieber was an avid reader, and during family trips to Chicago, he would escape to the museums--making regular visits to the Art Institute and the Field Museum. Sophie recalls, "Roy was fascinated, obviously, by the art museum, but also by all the objects in the Field Museum. And so his interest in the Third World was very old, in fact. He had this kind of curiosity ... that he never outgrew--a little bit like a boy taking apart a clock to see how it works."

In 1941 Sieber attended the State Teacher's College in Milwaukee, where he had a fellowship in studio arts, and took art history classes as well. The next year he joined the army, ending up in a specialized pre-med training unit. (1) After completing military service, he enrolled in medical school in New York City, which, Sophie suggests, allowed him "to do all that prowling" around museums and art dealers. The next year he enrolled in the New School of Social Research, where he took studio classes but also attended lectures led by Meyer Schapiro, Rudolph Arnheim, Hannah Deinhardt, and others. (2)

The great partnership of Roy and Sophie Sieber began in 1948, when they met as counselors in a summer camp; they were to marry two years later. In 1949 Sieber headed off to the State University of Iowa (now the University of Iowa) to study print-making and painting, seeking, at the time, a master's degree in fine arts. Once at Iowa, however, art history became his focus.

Sieber's interest in the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas was stimulated by what Sophie remembers as a "terrible class in 'primitive' and prehistoric arts" taught by a professor in the anthropology department. Sieber himself said, in his interview with Doran Ross: "It was quite possibly the worst course I had ever had in my life. This became in a reverse sort of way a challenge. I started doing serious reading on my own and took some courses in anthropology" (see Ross 1994:36). When that professor left, Sieber taught a course on non-Western arts in the art department.

He could not convince the chair of the department to allow him to focus on African art for his dissertation topic, but he nevertheless continued to pursue his interest in the subject. Turned down for Ford Foundation grants in African studies (at the time, normally awarded to political scientists or ethnographers, but not to art historians) Sieber traveled to Northwestern University to meet the anthropologist Melville Herskovits, who was interested in art and had been to Africa.

A lucky break in 1956 provided professional experience and valuable contacts. For the university's Festival of Fine Arts, Sieber was asked to create an exhibition of African art. (3) Sophie recalled that shortly thereafter,

   ... Herskovits called Roy and said,
   "There's this man from the British
   Museum here to lecture. Could you
   dig up some money, and would
   you be willing to have him to come
   to Iowa?" And that was Bill Fagg
   [the doyen of African art studies
   in England]. So, all in the span of
   a few weeks, here was Herskovits,
   and Bill Fagg and Margo Plass, who
   was [Fagg's] escort in the States.
   And so they told Roy about the collection
   at the Field Museum and
   about a young collector who might
   be willing to lend to the show, and
   that turned out to be [Raymond]
   Wielgus.

Sieber's first exhibition, "African Sculpture," was a success (Fig. 3). He observed, "It convinced the head of the department, Lester Longman, that maybe I was serious enough to do a dissertation on the topic" (see Ross 1994:36).

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Indeed, Sieber was the first scholar in the United States to receive a Ph.D. in African art history, granted by the State University of Iowa in August 1957. Nearing the completion of his degree, he was awarded the formerly elusive Ford grant to continue his work. He spent the fall semester at Northwestern, where Melville Herskovits was teaching and where he met the Africanists Alan Merriam, Tom Hodgkins (who later was responsible for inviting Sieber to the University of Ghana), Jim Vaughan, and Warren d'Azevedo. From there, the family was off, first to London, where Sieber continued his prowling--this time in the collections and archives of the British Museum--and then to Nigeria. Family memories of the early days in Nigeria were not about the research so much as the excitement of living in a new and different place. (4)

Sieber characterized his early research hi Nigeria as "an exercise in discovering Africa," guided by serendipity (see Ross 1994:47). He ended up in Jos (considered to have a healthier climate for an American family) with an Igala steward who provided an entree into the arts of the Igala and the Idoma (Ross, p. 47). The rest is (art) history: these first experiences in the field set the framework for much of Sieber's approach to African arts throughout his long career--an emphasis on fieldwork, an interest in the arts of understudied areas, a reliance on surveys to document the range of arts and artists at a particular time (see Sieber 1973). The early focus on carved Igala doors, for example, departed from the then prevailing emphasis on wooden masks and figures and demonstrated Sieber's broad definition of African arts.

Sieber also underscored the importance of documenting the names of artists and the dates of objects (Fig. 2), as he conveyed in his 1961 exhibition and publication for the Museum of Primitive Art, Sculpture of Northern Nigeria (Fig. 4). He assembled a study collection at Iowa that, along with field photographs, formed the basis of a 1959 exhibition, "Nigerian Arts," which he organized for another of the university's Fine Arts Festivals. The research in Nigeria would inspire his first Ph.D. student, the late Arnold Rubin, to conduct fieldwork in the Middle Benue region, and over the years, other of his doctoral students also chose Nigeria as their field site. (5) Sieber was also instrumental in building the university's collection of African arts (Figs. 5, 6).

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In 1962 he left the University of Iowa at the behest--Sieber said "connivance"--of the political scientist J. Gus Liebenow, who was working to establish Indiana University's prominence in African studies, with Alan Merriam as another new recruit, he joined an impressive group of Africanist scholars in Bloomington who helped found the university's African Studies Program. That year Sieber and Merriam, a noted ethnomusicologist, teamed up to teach an African arts and humanities seminar, addressing broadly for the first time the contexts of music, literature, and the visual arts in African societies (Sieber 1993:2). Truly, this was an exciting period in the study of African arts, as scholars gathered together at Indiana to consider the arts from multiple perspectives. (6) Among the early highlights was a 1964 seminar series and conference the following year that ultimately led to the publication The Traditional Artist in African Societies (edited by Warren d'Azevedo), to which Sieber contributed the essay "Approaches to non-Western Art." Sieber and Merriam maintained a long tradition of scholarly collaboration and co-teaching at Indiana University until Merriam's death in 1980.

During his tenure at Indiana, Sieber made several trips to Africa. In 1964, and again in 1967, he was a Visiting Professor at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana. There he researched Kwahu terracottas and oral history, and his findings were later published as a chapter in the volume African Art and Leadership, edited by Douglas Fraser and Herbert M. Cole (Sieber 1972a). He also helped establish the museum at the Institute. Sieber's work provided an entr6e for a number of his doctoral students who later conducted research in Ghana. (7) In 1971, as a Visiting Professor at the University of Ife, Sieber conducted research on textiles and other arts, particularly in Ede.

Teaching was of paramount importance to Sieber, (8) and his enduring legacy may well be demonstrated by his many students who now teach at universities or work in museums throughout the United States. Sieber was in the Fine Arts Department at Indiana University for more than thirty years, and in 1974 was named Rudy Professor of Fine Arts. Throughout and after his long career at Indiana, he served as teacher, mentor, and inspirational guide to the more than forty Ph.D. students he supervised, to countless other students at the M.A. and undergraduate levels, and to scores of others who did not have the opportunity to study formally with him. (9) The late Keith Nicklin, for example, told of his first meeting with Sieber at the National Museum in Lagos in 1971 (personal communication, April 12, 2002). With Richard York (Senior Archaeologist with the Nigerian Federal Department of Antiquities at the time), they went out to share a beer:

   I listened to their stories with the
   awe of a child. This was my first
   experience of the irrepressible Sieber
   chuckle. In such august company I
   had not been expected to be called
   upon to "perform." Nevertheless,
   Roy broached the subject of my initial
   sallies into the field, and so,
   with trepidation, I related my quest
   for the Cross River skin-covered
   mask.... In thorn early days in Nigeria
   ... I was starved of practical advice
   and academic exchange. Roy's
   visit was a godsend. His reaction
   to my work was highly enthusiastic,
   and he commented as to future
   strategy. Most important of all: here
   was one of the gurus in African art
   studies taking my project seriously
   and pointing out new directions. I
   felt both honoured and inspired,
   able now to undertake fieldwork
   with greater confidence. In formal
   terms, Roy was never my professor;
   yet, henceforth, I somehow regarded
   him as such.

Robin Poynor offered this recollection in his touching tribute delivered at Sieber's memorial celebration, held at Indiana University on October 6, 2001:

   As Sieber students, we did not get a
   professor who merely lectured in
   class. The Siebers invited us over.... I
   recall Judy Perani, Fred Smith, Bill
   Siegmann, and me lying on the floor
   of the Sieber living room, Sophie
   working on a project, Sieber sitting
   ready to advise. As we worked and
   reworked proposals for Ford and
   Fulbright money, we'd show them
   to him and hear, "But you still
   haven't told me what you want to
   do. State what it is you want to do,"
   making sure we were clear and
   forthright in our writing. (We all got
   Fulbrights, by the way.) ... We obtained
   the entire Sieber family in the
   process of being Sieber students.

It was always a treat to go to the Sieber house. The dining room was usually piled with books and papers, spillover from several ongoing projects. The living room was crammed with art treasures, which we would get to handle. Sieber would invite us over to meet a colleague passing through or to mark the start or end of an expedition to a Bloomington hotel where an art dealer had set up a small marketplace in his room. Sometimes a dealer would even slash prices for a "midnight madness sale," and impoverished students could walk away with an affordable small treasure usually of recent manufacture. I will attest to some measure of anxiety about these visits, however, as our professor would inevitably ask one of us to identify an object or offer an opinion about its origin or quality. (10)

That familiarity with objects was an important part of our studies with Sieber. Throughout his career, he made it his business to see as many works as possible and, thus, to learn from them. He also made it a point to get to know many private collectors of African art, offering them advice and making a mental inventory of important pieces in their collections to consider for future exhibitions. His longstanding friendship with Chicago-based collectors Raymond and Laura Wielgus was instrumental in securing objects on loan for some of his early exhibitions of African arts. More important, his relationship with Wielgus ensured the position of the Indiana University Art Museum as one of the nation's best university museums for its outstanding collections of African, Oceanic, pre-Columbian and Native American arts; its holdings included many important masterworks acquired over the years through purchase or donation from the Wielguses (Cover, Figs. 7-9). The University of Iowa was also a beneficiary of these collectors' largesse, though to a lesser extent (Fig. 10). During Sieber's ten years as Associate Director of Research and Collections at the National Museum of African Art, that museum also acquired important pieces from the New York collector Ernst Anspach, with whom Sieber enjoyed a long association (Fig. 11).

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Ever the teacher, Sieber sought to educate others about African art. (11) One way he did this, of course, was through museum exhibitions and the scholarly publications that accompanied them. The Paul Tishman collection (Fig. 12), for example, was featured in the important early publication Sculpture of Black Africa (1968), which Sieber co-wrote with Arnold Rubin for an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. (12) The book countered the format established in the 1930s by Carl Kjersmeier that neglected historical relationships and organized artworks by their geographical distribution (Sieber & Rubin 1968:10). In contrast, Sieber and Rubin's organizational scheme was first based on style zones--characterized by complex historical and linguistic as well as stylistic factors that were then particularized by works of art attributed to certain ethnic groups. Subsequent generations of Africanist art historians have used, refined, and expanded upon this approach, and it remains a useful framework that has been adopted, with modifications of course, by the most recent textbooks on African arts (e.g., Perani & Smith 1998; Visona et al. 2001).

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The collector Katherine White collaborated with Sieber on two ground-breaking exhibitions that demonstrated his inclusive approach. For "African Textiles and Decorative Arts" (1972), she surveyed scores of public institutions and private collections, amassing a treasure trove of images for Sieber to consider (Figs. 14-16). Many of these images also guided the early development of Sieber's "African Furniture and Household Objects" (1980), which was co-curated by White (Figs. 17, 19, 20). These two traveling exhibitions, which included selected pieces from White's collection, expanded the scope of what constituted African arts. They were also enormously popular, introducing a broad audience to the beauty and scope of works from the continent. Their associated publications (Figs. 13, 18) remain classics in the field. In fact, for much of the early history of African art studies, there were no comprehensive textbooks; professors and students alike relied on selected journal articles, edited books, and museum exhibition catalogues to provide the general overviews, specific case studies, and critical aesthetic and contextual analyses. As might be expected, Sieber was a key contributor to many of these efforts.

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Roy Sieber's scholarly accomplishments are many, and it is unnecessary to chronicle here all the contributions that attest to his rich professional career. Knowing the public impact of exhibitions, he was generous with his time in consulting with university and other museums, as well as galleries, that were planning to exhibit African works, and then writing introductory remarks to the publications that emerged from these exhibitions. He was an advisor to numerous museums and universities seeking to initiate, expand, or enhance the study of African arts. Sieber promoted the cause of African arts at every opportunity.

Essays in this special issue and the next are illustrated by a broad array of objects that characterize the expanding parameters of Africanist art historical inquiry and emphasize approaches that were important to Sieber--involving field research, history, connoisseurship, context, and change. In this issue, Martha Anderson writes about Ijo concepts of sacrifice as reflected in a particular constellation of objects and their ritual contexts (p. 24). Christa Clarke chronicles an early history of Western taste in African art, a subject of longstanding interest to Sieber (p. 40; see Ross 1994:43). Kristyne Loughran's article on Tuareg jewelry and fashion adds an important contemporary market-driven dimension to the interpretation of dynamic tradition-based art forms (p. 52). Finally, Suzanne Gott traces the complex history and changing function of Akan dual-disk pectorals (p. 66). These articles illustrate the multiple approaches to the study and appreciation of African arts, something Roy Sieber championed throughout his long and distinguished career as he shaped the discipline of African art history. He has our gratitude and our deepest respect.

[This article was accepted for publication in November 2002.]

Quotes from members of the Sieber family are drawn from an interview I conducted on May 18, 2002, in Bloomington. I would like to offer Sophie, Mark Thyne, Ellen, and Matt my deepest gratitude for sharing with me so many of their wonderful memories.

Robin Poynor, University of Florida, Gainesville, graciously allowed me to quote from his tribute given at Roy Sieber's memorial celebration. Finally, I wish to thank Diane Pelrine, Indiana University Art Museum; Christopher D. Roy, Victoria Rovine, and Jeffrey Martin, University of iowa; and Pare McClusky and Jill Walek, Seattle Art Museum, for their help in locating photographs of objects used in this introduction.

(1.) Thyne recalled how her father's debating skills got him a score of 100% on the pre-med aptitude test he took while in the armed forces. Her father apparently missed one question, but argued convincingly that there could be more than one correct answer.

(2.) Those who have studied with Sieber are well aware of how the work of Meyer Schapiro, especially Schapiro's essay "Style" (1953), influenced Sieber's multifaceted approach to objects and to the study of style in African arts.

(3.) This was an annual summer exhibit festival organized by the university prior to the establishment of its museum.

(4.) Among the family's early memories of Nigeria is the time that it rained on only one side of the house, providing contradictory responses from the parents--one of them facing the rainy side, the other the sunny side--when one child asked to go out and play. Family lore about Nigeria also Includes Sophie's concerns about snakes, and Mark's encounter with one. Apparently, heeding his parents' cries to go in the opposite direction of an oncoming snake, Mark, ever the literalist went toward it, as he felt that to turn around and run away would mean going in the same direction as the snake.

(5.) Among the Sieber doctoral students whose field research has contributed to the study of Nigerian arts are Robin Poynor, Judith Perani, Roslyn Walker, the late Cornelius Adepegba, Lisa Aronson, Theodore Celenko, Babatunde Lawal, Martha Anderson, Kathy Curnow, Andrea Nicolls, Eli Bentor, and dele jegede. Sincere apologies to those whose names I have inadvertently overlooked.

(6.) Sophie observed: "What really made the time exciting was all the students who had gone to Africa in the Peace Corps, then returned to the U.S. and wanted to learn more, so they came to [Indiana University] grad school in African studies."

(7.) These doctoral students included Rene Bravmann, Fred Smith, Daniel Mato, and Suzanne Gott, as web as "academic grandson" Nii Quarcoopome, who was a doctoral student of Arnold Rubin. Again, I apologize if I have omitted anyone's name.

(8.) Sieber was always in demand, and over the course of his career he served as Visiting Professor at many colleges and universities, including the University of Arizona, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Ghana, the University of Ife, Oberlin College, Indiana Central College (now the University of Indianapolis), Carlton College, Columbia University, and the University of Pittsburgh. After retiring in 1994, Sieber was invited by former student Robin Poynor to Gainesville, where he served a year In residence (1994 95) as the Harn Eminent Scholar in Art History Chair. There he conducted a year-long seminar on African arts with six University of Florida graduate students, who, under his tutelage, developed the exhibition "African Art: Permutations of Power."

(9.) I asked the Siebers what it was like to to grow up in such a large extended family, with constant unexpected visits from students, dealers, traders, and collectors. Thyne responded with this recollection of a day in the 1960s: "We were back from Ghana about three months, and we were all sitting around. It was a rainy day and we couldn't play outside. We were all bored. And we said, 'Mom, we wish an African trader would come by.'" According to Ellen, that would often happen in Africa, "where we didn't have a phone and people would stop by instead of calling. So [those random visits] made it much more entertaining for us kids."

(10.) Being surrounded by the family didn't help, because they always seemed to be in the know. Ellen provided some clarification on this point: "Dad would be telling a student or somebody about something, and he would turn to us and say, 'Go get the such-and-such piece'. And later we'd hear from the visitor that it was so intimidating that we'd come down with the right object ... But what the student didn't know was that we'd go upstairs and we'd have a little whispered conference: 'Which one is it? I don't know!' It'd be like a multiple-choice thing with us: 'I know it's not that one, and it must be a new one because otherwise they would have already seen it.' So it wasn't really knowledge [of African art] that drove us [to select the correct piece]."

(11.) I would have added that Sieber not only educated but also inspired others, but as Sophie pointed out to me: he "didn't seek to inspire others--he just did, and I always told him he was a missionary or a supersalesman."

(12.) A number of artworks from the Tishman collection were acquired through gift or purchase as The National Museum of African Art began to expand its holdings once it became part of the Smithsonian Institution.

References cited

Kjersmeier, Carl. 1987. Centres de style de la sculpture negre africaine. New York: Hacker Art Books. 1st ed. 1935.

Perani, Judith and Fred 12 Smith. 1998. The Visual Arts of Africa: Gender, Power and Life Cycle Rituals. Upper Saddle Ridge, NJ: Prentice Hall

Ross, Doran H. 1992. "Interview with Roy Sieber," African Arts 25, 4:36-51.

Schapiro, Meyer 1953. "Style" in Anthropology Today ed. A. L. Kroeber, pp. 287-312. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sieber, Roy. 1961. Sculpture of Northern Nigeria. New York: Museum of Primitive Art.

Sieber, Roy. 1968. "The Art of Primitive Arts," Art News, Special Issue on the Museum of Primitive Art (Jan.): 2, 33, 43, 66-67.

Sieber, Roy. 1972a, "Kwahu Terracottas, Oral Traditions, and Ghanaian History," in African Art and Leadership, eds. Douglas Fraser and Herbert M. Cole, pp. 173-83. Madison and London: The University of Wisconsin Press.

Sieber, Roy. 1972b. African Textiles and Decorative Arts. New York: Museum of Modern Art.

Sieber, Roy. 1973a. "Ede: Crafts and Surveys," African Arts 6, 4:44-49, 94, 95.

Sieber, Roy. 1973b. "Approaches to Non-Western Art," in The Traditional Artist in African Societies, ed. Warren d'Azevedo, pp. 425-34. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press.

Sieber, Roy. 1980. African Furniture and Household Objects. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press in association with The American Federation of Arts, New York.

Sieber, Roy. 1993. "Reflections on the Study of African Art," African Studies Program Newsletter (Spring/Summer), Indiana University 1-5.

Sieber, Roy and Arnold Rubin. 1968. Sculpture of Black Africa. The Paul Tishman Collection. Los Angeles: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Thompson, Robert Farris. 2001. "Roy Sieber: Master before the Changeless Mirror" (In Memoriam), African Arts 34, 4:14-15.

Visona, Monica Blackmun, et al. 2001. A History of Art in Africa. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

Christine Mullen Kreamer, a curator at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, received her Ph.D. from Indiana University in African art history. Among the NMAfA exhibitions she has recently curated are "Making the Grade: African Arts of Initiation" and "Gifts end Blessings: The Textile Arts of Madagascar." She is currently collaborating with the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History on an exhibition on writing and inscriptions in African art, slated to open in Washington, D.C., in mid-2004. Kreamer is also a consulting editor of African Arts.