African Art, African Voices: Long Steps Never Broke a Back.

African Art, African Voices Long Steps Never Broke a Back Philadelphia Museum of Art October 2, 2004-January 2, 2005

"African Art, African Voices: Long Steps Never Broke a Back" is a traveling exhibition created by curator Pamela McClusky at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM). The exhibition comprises more than 170 works selected predominantly from SAM's holdings, with the greatest share coming from the well-known Katherine White Collection. The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) was the exhibit's first of four venues (it also will travel to the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville). On view from October 2004 to January 2, 2005, the installation at the PMA was expanded considerably by John Zarobell, the exhibit's coordinating curator, who included more than thirty additional works of modern and contemporary art, most of which were selected from public and private collections in the New York and Washington, D.C., areas.

Though the exhibition's introductory panel described the show as a "survey of artistic achievements" from sub-Saharan Africa, "African Art, African Voices" was designed to be much more than that. The Seattle Art Museum's original initiative was to bring African experts and communities into the interpretive process, and to do so using more experimental exhibitry than the norm (Pamela McClusky, personal communication). The PMA installation thus highlighted the importance of African agency, expertise, and context in the display of African art. Indeed, the didactic core of the exhibition was an audio guide featuring the voices of ten experts or "cultural advisors," all but one of them African, whose lively annotations of the works on display--be it through personal anecdote, the interpretation of symbols and proverbs, storytelling, or lively formal analyses of figurative sculptures--provided visitors with a range of contextual information creating frameworks for looking at the artwork. Though varying in quality, the five videos distributed throughout the galleries helped to evoke a sense of place and conveyed well the living, performative dimensions of the works on display. The exhibit's focus on assisted looking--together with the fact that both tradition-based and modern/contemporary art was featured in the show--made it especially rich for thinking about representational practices in the display of African art.

The first thing visitors encountered as they entered the exhibit was a darkened room with a vitrined Benin bronze head, silhouetted against a lively video "mural" of contemporary street scenes from several cities across Africa. This was visually effective and coaxed a sense of connection between Africa's past and present, the regal and the everyday, which helped set a tone for the exhibit. From here visitors entered into the main exhibition space, predictably earth-toned in color, warmly lit at the entrance, and brightening as one passed through exhibit. Objects were vitrined or clustered--at times overly crowded, as with the gelede, Kom, and egungun displays--on rather inelegant platforms, while ndop and kente textiles were hung high on the walls. Visitors were strongly urged to use the audio guide, not only to experience the full effect of the exhibit, but also to access information about the objects that was lacking in the sparse and often vague text panels. All the modern and contemporary art--including photographs, mixed-media works, paintings, sculptures, an installation, and works on paper--was placed rather conspicuously in two "white cube" galleries at the end of the exhibition--a point I return to below.

I found it a bit odd that neither the introductory text panel nor the audio guide explained the meaning of the exhibition's subtitle, "Long Steps Never Broke a Back," or even mentioned that this was a Yoruba proverb, especially since its meaning was directly related to the curatorial goals of collaboration and contextualization and could have served to introduce them as such. This kind of transparency can convey to visitors that interpretation is never neutral and cannot be taken for granted--particularly where African art is concerned.

Like the exhibit's outstanding companion catalogue, artworks were grouped into roughly ten sections or "stories," beginning with "Heroes Go Solitary Walking," which featured three hunter's/warrior's shirts from the Katherine White Collection (Asante, Mande, and the wonderfully encrusted Maninka vest). Though these works were dramatically described on the audio guide, no text panel or advisor's biography accompanied them in the gallery. These were followed by "Collecting by and for Maasai Memories," which included beaded jewelry and belts, shields and spears, a headdress, game board, and assortment of leatherwork from the Kaputiei Maasai, as well as an interesting video showing members of the advisor's community selecting and donating works for the exhibit (an unusual story that left me wanting to know more). This was followed by "Sacred Medicines of the Kongo," which featured a cosmogram (drawn on the floor) and six Kongo figures, including an nkondi figure and my personal favorite, the delicately expressive "seated officer" (81.17.835). This was followed by "Assembling a Royal Stage: Art from the Kom Kingdom," where, despite the overcrowding of works on the platform, the elegant memorial figure of a queen mother (81.17.718) stood out. Next came a selection of works from Robert Farris Thompson's earlier book and exhibition project "African Art in Motion," among which I found the Osei Bonsu seated mother and child (81.17.323) and the Montol female figure (81.17.541) the most compelling. This was followed by "Art of Persuasion: Regalia from the Asante Kingdom," which included gold jewelry and gold weights, stools, kente cloth, and a film of the Asantehene's enstoolment procession, aptly described by advisor Koo Nimo Amponsah as a "museum in motion." Next, visitors came upon the intimidating basinjom "fault-finder," an impressive full-body costume with mask that was delightfully narrated (on the audio guide) by an initiate who, unfortunately, was never identified as Robert Farris Thompson. This was followed by groupings of Dan, gelede, and sowei masks. Among these, I was drawn to the gelede masks, particularly one attributed to Akapo of Igbesa (81.17.585) and those with delightfully jeering superstructures conveying their cautionary tales. These were followed by a cluster of Egungun masquerades, and directly above them, a wall-sized screen projecting films of seven different masquerade performances featuring mask types from the exhibit. In these last several sections, the narratives moved freely between terms that referred to ethnic groups, masquerade types, and initiation societies, which might have been confusing to a general audience.

The last two galleries of the exhibition displayed works from twenty-four modern and contemporary artists, both long-established and on the rise. Though a specialist in nineteenth century French painting, Zarobell's growing interest in African contemporary art inspired his decision to expand the contemporary art component of the SAM exhibition from approximately seven to thirty-seven works. Of particular interest here was William Kentridge's Medusa (2001), an inventive example of the artist's great talent for visual allegory. I was also especially drawn to Abdulaye Ndoye's beautifully obsessive, invented script (Parchment series IV, 2003); a suite of photographs by Malick Sidibe; a large-format photograph from Zwelethu Mthethwa's sugar cane cutter series (2001); Kwesi Owusu-Ankomah's striking play on perception and movement in Off My Back (1995); and Communication (c. 2000), a richly textured work in natural dye and handmade paper by one of the few women artists featured, Sira Sissoko. The section also included a video of funerals from Ghana featuring a number of intriguing "designer" coffins like the one on exhibit here by Kane Quaye (Mercedes Benz Coffin). For the most part, the works in this section held together aesthetically and featured a range of media. However, no information was provided as to what concept or vision drove the selection of the modern and contemporary artworks, or how they might connect with--or depart from--the works in the rest of the exhibition. Moreover, while the issues of subjectivity, authenticity, and difference that exhibition advisor Sylvester Ogbechie collapsed into the section's text panel (and audio narrative) are important indeed, for a general audience, these comments needed to be less opaque, or perhaps to have been grounded in a broader statement about the identity-driven politics that have shaped the international contemporary art scene.

Each section in the exhibition displayed a biography and photograph of the featured advisor or interpreter, as well as a brief text panel excerpted from the audio tour. It was clear from this display of information that the advisors were considered to be as important as the artworks they were asked to enliven. However, it might have been less distracting to have printed their bios and portraits in a simple three-fold take-away or brochure. While the content of the advisors' narratives, though engaging, was sometimes lacking in object information, taken together, the presence of advisors called attention to the range of expertise that is brought to bear in the production, use, and interpretation of African art. For instance, visitors learned that a person could acquire knowledge as part of one's patrimony, through initiation, and through apprenticeship, as well as through scholarship in the Western tradition; and one could impart knowledge through performance, parody, storytelling, and exegesis. Thus, different ways of knowing were represented through the artwork. Indeed, the emphasis on African voices is very important and redresses the near absence of Africans in the interpretive planning of most art exhibitions. However, we should also be mindful not to portray their knowledge as inherently "authentic," as this tends to encourage a limited, essentialized view of the connections between knowledge and identity.

One of the more problematic aspects of the exhibition was the absence of transition (in the form of didactic assistance) to the last section, "Contemporary African Art." While there is no problem with the "white cube" in itself, moving from a busy, context-saturated display to one that, for the most part, effaced context, required some explanation for several reasons, especially given most American audiences' inexperience with African art. The problem, I would argue, in segregating "the contemporary" and placing it at the exhibit's end is that it tends to encourage a temporal, "that was then, this is now" comparison between traditional and contemporary art practices. This, in effect, returns "the traditional" to the past and undermines what I took to be one of the exhibit's underlying premises--that African art production is not lodged in the past, but is ongoing and deeply implicated in the lives of Africans today. Of course, there are distinctions between tradition-based and contemporary art, but their relationship might best be presented in terms of dialogue and debate, as artists working in either of these arenas may draw at different times, in various ways, on both local African and international trends in art. Finally, given the emphasis on context and narrative in the rest of the exhibit, the absence of artists' voices in this section seemed a bit contrived--and promoted the prevailing attitude that curators need not contextualize or annotate contemporary art--African or otherwise.

Indeed, Yinka Shonibare was the only artist featured on the audio guide. While advisor Ogbechie's commentaries on Sidibe's photographs and Owusu-Ankomah's canvas were quite interesting, I was disappointed to find no other artist speaking to their work--again, given the premise of the exhibition. In a personal communication, coordinating curator John Zarobell explained that artists-as-advisors should not do all the work for viewers, and that including their commentaries might have brought too biographical an approach to the art, thereby limiting the possible range of its interpretation. I agree that viewers have to "work" at art. But there is also great value in knowing the artist's intention, inspiration, or experience. This kind of information would have enhanced our looking as it did with the tradition-based works, though perhaps to a different end: not to authenticate the work or locate it in context, but rather to assist with resonance, to enable that tension or dialogue that transforms the visual into something else.

On the whole, the exhibition was an engaging introduction for general audiences to the living arts of Africa and, with its focus on assisted looking through voice and film, offered an alternative to more orthodox art museum didactics. The exhibit was also accompanied by an extensive array of public programming, which included storytelling, music and dance performances, lectures, a fashion show, and a bustling African marketplace recreated on the museum's East Terrace. Zarobell's decision to expand the exhibit's modern and contemporary component was an invaluable step towards introducing the PMA's public to the sophistication and range of African contemporary art practices. For scholars and other specialists in the field, I think the exhibition's main contribution was in its attempt to "mix it up" a bit, that is, to push the boundaries between those "aesthetic" and "contextual" modes of representation that have long distinguished art from cultural history or ethnographic museums--an effort that might have been extended to the contemporary works as well.

The exhibition's companion catalogue, published by SAM in 2002, is eloquently written by Pamela McClusky (with a contribution by Robert Farris Thompson), richly illustrated, and explicit in intent. Indeed, many of the deficiencies noted here regarding the exhibition's physical presentation are remedied or addressed in the catalogue. Just over 300 pages long, it is available in both hardcover and paperback.