African art and culture in Maine.

In recent years I have resided in Maine during the summer. Maine is one of the least ethnically diverse states in the United States. Yet, I have found a variety of African activities and individuals there. There may be others that I have not discovered, as I generally move about the state's southern region. Maine is better known for its New England maritime art, its lobsters and fishing, and its resorts and summer camps than for any interest in Africa. The African artistic and cultural diaspora--in contemporary arts and crafts, in more or less "traditional" forms, in tourist objects, and in the presence of Africans and scholars of African art--now exist in Maine. If these have reached Maine, where are they not found now in the United States? The American experience with African art and culture is growing at the everyday grassroots level, alongside the more elite contributions of museums and universities, with which scholars are likely to be familiar.

In 2004 I arrived in Portland, Maine the day before the annual celebration of the Museum of African Culture (formerly the Museum of African Tribal Art), which I attended. This small museum, located in three rooms on the ground floor of a residential home, has been in operation for more than seven years. It was founded, and is owned and directed by Oscar O. Mokeme, an Igbo from Oba, near Onitsha, in southeastern Nigeria. Mokeme began collecting and interpreting African art in Nigeria in 1976. He came to the United States in 1979, and since then has had a varied career, attending university and operating import and export businesses. In 1998 he put that aside to found his museum. The only African-owned museum in the United States, as far as I know, the Museum of African Culture is a nonprofit institution. Its collection consists of more than 1,500 objects, and Mokeme has many others stored in his Nigerian hometown. The museum's main attractions consist of masks, stools, and other objects of Igbo background which have been used in ceremonies in Nigeria and, unusually for a museum, a considerable number of full-dress costumes to go with the masks. These are on display in the permanent gallery. A second, somewhat smaller gallery is used for rotating exhibitions of personal collections of individuals from Maine and nearby New Hampshire, as well as some other Igbo objects and works from other regions of West Africa. While much of the Igbo material comes from Oba and the surrounding area, which Mokeme returns to now and then, he has also brought to Maine objects from Awka, Nri, and Igbo-Ukwu (Fig. 1). There are also some West African tourist pieces on display. The Igbo masks and figures vary in quality from those very well sculpted by my standards, to the average, and to the mediocre. They range from those of some age to the relatively new. As a whole, they are much as we might see art objects in an actual Igbo masquerade, rather than what we view in a museum exhibition, where only the finest pieces (by Western standards) are likely to be presented. The museum collection thus provides me with the sense of being in Africa more than do the usual African exhibitions in the United States. The museum is developing a small educational center, which includes a small African art and culture lending library. School children in the Portland area appear to be frequent visitors to the museum and are the users of this educational room.

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On August 8, 2004, at the sixth anniversary celebration in the courtyard in back of the museum, Mokeme masked and dressed in one of the museum's costumes, energetically danced and drummed for a modest audience of his white supporters, who assist him in running the museum and in raising funds for it. Some of these helpers have had African experience themselves; one of them was exhibiting her collection of African miniatures in the museum at the time of the celebration. The museum survives through the energy of Mokeme and these helpers, with modest grants from local businesses and foundations and the city of Portland, as well as through gifts of objects by interested persons. Admission is free, with a suggested donation.

As far as I know Mokeme is not in the business of selling African art, but of being a museum director. The museum's recent name change reflects his desire to focus more on education about Africa in general, rather than entirely on the arts, and his is the only institution in northern New England devoted entirely to African culture. Not only are there visiting school groups at the museum, but Mokeme talks on African culture and cultural diversity at schools from kindergarten through grade 12, at universities and colleges in Maine and New Hampshire, and at other sites. In early 2005 he began showing videos and films every Friday at 5:00 pm, projected onto a small screen in one of the museum's galleries; both projector and screen were obtained through a small grant. Fifteen to twenty people generally show up for these screenings. The visuals are mainly from Nigeria, Senegal, and Mali. Mokeme also occasionally holds story-telling sessions. The museum has recently established the Museum of African Culture Endowment Fund, through the Maine Community Foundation, to educate the public on issues of diversity and African culture. Mokeme would like to publish a catalogue of selected pieces in his collection.

Mokeme's dedication to art and performance is so great that not too long ago he began paying school fees for some primary and secondary students at Oba on condition that they were willing to take part in masquerades, which are dying out as a result of social change and evangelism. And through a $15,000 grant from the Maine Arts Commission he created The Black Artists Forum of Maine, through which he is attempting to interest black artists in Maine and New Hampshire in drawing from African art, as well as providing them with a base at the museum for communication and interaction.

Mokeme is also an Igbo healer (dibia) with the priesthood title, acquired in 1982, of Ugo-Orji the First, the Ozo Dimani of Aboriji-Oba. Since 1976 he has practiced what he calls "traditional pluralistic Igbo transcultural psychotherapy and healing rituals." For healing he employs one Igbo shrine in the museum for diagnosis and another for developing cures. He treats barrenness as well as other health problems for both African-Americans and whites, but does not charge for his services; rather, he suggests donations to the museum's endowment. The museum exhibited a healing shrine at the International Conference on African Healing Wisdom in Washington, DC on July 6-9, 2005.

The rather simple quality of the Museum of African Culture, located on a side street, sharply contrasts with the Portland Museum of Art, two blocks away, just off of a main city street, whose major building addition was designed by Henri Nicolls Cobb of the I.M. Pei architectural group and constructed in 1983. It houses a fine collection of New England artists, including Winslow Homer, as well as the Joan Whitney Payson collection, a modest collection of modern European and American art. This museum has initiated enterprising exhibitions on modern American and European artists, one containing African art: "Affinities of Form," an exhibition of African, Oceanic, and Native American art drawn from the Raymond and Laura Wielgus collection at Indiana University, in 1996. The majority of the African objects in it were "traditional" twentieth-century pieces. The symbolic contrast between the two museums is evident. The substantial, well-established Portland Art Museum and the struggling, small African one tied to the entrepreneurship of an enthusiastic African and a small group of non-African followers determined to bring African art and culture to Maine, symbolize the wealth and power of the United States in contrast to the struggles of Africa and its ordinary citizens to survive and to achieve.

The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), at the Maine College of Art (MECA) near the Portland Museum of Art, has had two contemporary African art exhibitions. One was "Beyond Decorum: the Photography of Ike Ude," by the Nigerian artist living in New York City, held in 2000 under the supervision of the Institute's then director, Mark H.C. Bessire, and the other, presented in 2002, was "Translation/Seduction/Displacement," an exhibition of post-conceptual and photographic work by South African artists, curated by Lauri Firstenberg and John Peffer in 2001.

During the summer of 2004 I twice attended an exhibition, "Out of Bounds; Women Artists from Africa," at the art gallery of the small, private Westbrook College in suburban Portland, part of the University of New England. The gallery, which never had held an African exhibition before, is quite modern--three floors with a good-sized room on each--designed by Thomas Larson, a well-known Boston architect. "Out of Bounds" exhibited the art of twenty women artists, and was curated by Mimi Wolford of Washington, DC. She founded and directs the Mbari Institute for Contemporary African Art. (1) in that city and places occasional exhibitions of contemporary African art at various sites in the United States. Her mother, the late Jean Kennedy, was the author of an important early survey of contemporary African art (Kennedy 1992). The Kennedys, and Wolford as a girl, lived in Lagos during the time of the development of the Oshogbo artists and were among their patrons, holding salons for them in Lagos and at times exhibiting their work at venues in the United States. Wolford inherited her parents' substantial collection of Nigerian contemporary art.

While Wolford's exhibition of African women's art reflected her experience with Nigerian art--four of the twenty artists were from there--it had a broad sweep. Most of the artists lived in the United States, or had spent time here. They varied in age from young to senior, coming from widely different areas of Africa. In artistic experience they ranged from the well-established to those taking part in their first American exhibition. (However, neither Sokari Douglas Camp nor Magdalene Odundo, two prominent contemporary African women artists, both of whom have spent periods in the United States, were included).

Wolford writes in the exhibition brochure: "This is not an exhibition of the victimized; it showcases a group of extremely strong women, illustrating their concerns on many topics." Well known in the United States is Nike Davies-Okundaye (formerly Olaniyi), who was represented by cloth work and some interesting early embroidery pieces that I had never seen before. One large, starch-resist cloth, Osun Festival, was typical of much of her work, depicting numerous figures and events, so that the viewer's eye wandered about to take it all in. Ada Udechukwu, who freely interprets from Igbo uli style, was represented by works in ink, graphite and a collage. Her art is unusual among contemporary African artists for its very personal and introspective qualities. Angele Etoundi Essamba from Cameronn, who trained in art in Paris and the Netherlands, presented black-and-white photographs of human figures; for example, La Battante (The Victor), an image of a woman calmly sitting on top of an empty cage, glorying in her freedom (Fig. 2). Naglaa Ezzat from Egypt displayed large, detailed graphite drawings of women in various poses. I particularly liked her Bashtake Palace, which depicted an Egyptian woman sitting in a contemplating mood on the steps of a palace in old Cairo (Fig. 3). The interesting abstract work of Sira Sissoko from Mali, who trained at the National Institute of Arts in Bamako, employs double sheets of hand-made papers and muted natural background colors derived from henna, mud, onionskin, and cinnamon. I found her Danse des Signs Bambara to be striking, perhaps since it reminded me of Igbo uli motifs, in employing Bamana-like symbols in small strokes on background squares of dark, medium, or light brown (Fig. 4). Her art is sparse, neat, and precise. Monique Le Houeller, who resides in Abidjan though born in Hue, Vietnam, has adopted Africa as her home and has traveled widely in Africa. Her work, largely in metal, referred to the Sahel environment. Blue Door, a bluish, double-door standing piece, has direct reference to the Toureg (Fig. 5). The painter Roselyne Marikasi, from Zimbabwe, who trained in that country but now lives in the United States, is one of a number of artists in the exhibition whose pieces commented on AIDS. In her No Time to Grieve, men, with women in the background, are lowering a casket into the ground; the title refers to the high frequency of deaths from AIDS in Africa (Fig. 6). While there were too many artists to mention them all, the exhibition as a whole was strongly expressive of African life from women's viewpoints, with an awareness of Africa's problems, and the need for adequate solutions. It has yet to appear elsewhere: It is worth showing again.

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An earlier exhibition, which I missed, again curated by Mimi Wolford, "The Colors of Africa--Contemporary Perspectives," occurred at the same gallery between November 16, 2001, and January 5, 2002. Consisting of seventy works by thirty-six artists from eighteen African countries, it included well-known artists such as Ibrahim El Salahi, Amir Nour, El Loko, Bruce Onobrakpeya, Twins Seven-Seven, Sane Wadu, Wosene Kosrof, Sofia Kifle, and William Kentridge, as well as many younger artists. It was designed to show the rich variety of styles and talents in African contemporary art.

Several years ago there was an exhibition of the art of the well-known South African artist William Kentridge at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and in 1999 at Colby College, Waterville, there was a traveling exhibition about the African American artist David Driskell, entitled "Narratives of African-American Art and Identity: The David C. Driskell Collection." In 2003 there was an exhibition of the photographs at various sites in Maine entitled "Sebastiao Salgado: Migrations--Humanity in Transition," organized by the Portland Museum of Art. The Institute of Contemporary Art at the Maine College of Art exhibited Salgado's African photographs. Cindy Foley, the ICA's African education director, working with an after-school program, Project Safe and Smart, consisting mainly of African refugee students, showed them Salgado's images of refugee life in Africa. She discussed with them different perspectives on refugees, but the children's experiences often differed from those expressed in the photographs, opening up their memories of Africa, and sometimes acting as a catharsis--art in the service of therapy. Aimee Bessire, of the school's art history department, asked the students how they would portray their lives in Africa and in Maine. Foley gave them black-and-white throw-away cameras to document their present lives, out of which selected photographs were shown in the entry to MECA at the time of the Salgado exhibition.

There are a number of African performance groups in southern Maine, including The Nile Girls and the Acholi Boys, both from the Sudan; a Congolese girls dance group; Godfrey Banda, an mbira performer from Zimbabwe; and the dancer Brigitte Ndaya from Cameroun. In early 2005 The Nile, a restaurant in Portland serving Somali and Middle Eastern food, was started by a Somali. Refugees from that country were settled in Portland some years ago, a good number of whom have moved north to Lewiston, where the living is less costly. At Hancock, Maine, on coastal US Highway 1, several hours north of Portland, a small gallery, Arts and Africana, is run by Chriss Covert. She and her husband, Gray Parrot, have Gambian connections, visiting there at times. He learned to play the kota from a Gambian master, sings in Mandinka, and occasionally performs at Maine events, and also has a weekly African music program at a community radio station WERU-FM. Covert, who has had her gallery since 2002, is open on Fridays and Saturdays in the summer. Its contents are not unusual for an African tourist gallery except for the large selection of African cloths, which she obtains on visits to the Gambia, Senegal, and Mali, through African dealers in the United States, or from private individuals. What is unusual is that most of her cloth sales are to quilters in the eastern United States at quilting conventions and exhibitions. Much of this cloth is then cut into patches to use in hand-produced quilts, an intriguing diaspora element--Africa linked to a traditional American craft skill, which itself derived from Europe.

Another small tourist gallery, Deepest Africa Imports, run by Jackie Pelletier, is on Deer Island, further north along the Maine coast. This summer resort area is where the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts Center is located. Here, Wok Marcia Kure, a Nigerian contemporary artist residing in the United States, took a short course in fiber design in the summer of 2004. Deepest Africa Imports specializes in objects from southern Africa--not so much cloth as beads, dolls, jewelry, and other tourist items. The gallery owner lived in South Africa for a time and has contacts there to supply her store.

In addition to museums and galleries, Maine also boasts academic resources in African art. Dr. Aimee Bessire, a graduate of Harvard's African art history program under Suzanne Blier, who carried out two years' research among the Sukuma of northwestern Tanzania, is an assistant professor and chair of the Art History Department at the Maine College of Art (MECA) in Portland, where she mostly teaches African art related courses. In the 2005-06 academic year she will also teach two courses at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. Her most recent research has been in African photography, performance traditions in the diaspora, and in the study of objects employed for religious communication in Sukuma tradition. She recently published an interesting article in African Arts on Sukuma art performance, in which mostly wood figures are employed in ritual contests (Bessire 2005). She is planning a project on the study of power objects in three African societies, one of which may be the Igbo, working with Oscar Mokeme. She has been an active advisor on the board of his museum and in assisting Mokeme in preparing grant proposals. She works to bring together members of the Somalian community in Maine through MECA's Creative Community Partnerships.

The art historian Dr. Julie L. McGee teaches in the Art History and Africana Studies program at Bowdoin College, specializing in African American and South African studies. Trained at Bryn Mawr in Northern (Dutch) Mannerist painting, she then taught at Bowdoin, later working in New Orleans in a nonprofit organization with public school teachers in the Delta River Region, and teaching a course at Tulane University. In the South she discovered a love for African American and African art, but felt that the scholarship on African art within African American art history was poor. A summer program in Cote d'Ivoire with Philip M. Peek and Jerry Vogel further stimulated her African interests and she has been involved with the contemporary arts of South Africa for some five years. She taught in the CBB Cape Town program, a joint off-campus study center run by three Maine colleges--Colby, Bowdoin, and Bates--and sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, a project which closed in 2005.

Out of this experience she codirected and coproduced, with the South African Vuyile C. Voyiya, a 50-minute DVD, The Luggage is Still Labeled: Blackness in South African Art (2003). The film concerns the cultural politics and socio-economic constraints for post-apartheid black South African artists, indicating that the structural conditions of a social and political nature existing during apartheid have not been dissipated. White control of the major galleries still continues, few black art teachers exist at universities and colleges, black artists are viewed as a separate and special category, a step down from white artists, and a range of institutional controls inhibit the development of the work of black artists; their marginalization still continues. The DVD has created some controversy, as some others feel that the situation has improved considerably for black artists since apartheid's end and that some of them have succeeded at the national and international level. Of course, artists in the West are also subject to institutional control, the domination of curators, art critics, dealers, and the views of scholars at art schools. But South Africa has had its history of apartheid and racism and the period that has followed has not removed all these elements, as is also the case in other areas of South African life. Lacking expertise here, I am not in a position to fully evaluate the arguments, but it is clear that there are still problems for black artists growing out of past apartheid experience.

McGee is now also completing a manuscript on the well-known African American artist David Driskell, and she left for South Africa on August 1, 2005, to write a small monograph on Garth Erasmus, whose work she has followed for several years. She has published a number of articles on contemporary South African art.

The growth in Maine of African elements covers a wide range of social levels--including museums and galleries, academia, dance and singing groups, tourist galleries, a restaurant, and most importantly immigrants and refugees from the Horn of Africa. There are a variety of collaborations between Africans and others. The African presence and influence at a wide range of social levels is occurring everywhere in America. I see it in Seattle, where there are substantial groups of Somalians, Eritreans, and Ethiopians, each with their cultural centers and their own artists. At one time a gallery in downtown Seattle existed which specialized in contemporary Africa art. A small African Studies Program exists at the University of Washington and there is the very fine Katherine White Collection at the Seattle Art Museum. We see the profound African presence in the spread of Yoruba culture, not only in urban areas such as in New York, but in the American South and elsewhere. We see it in Moyo Okediji's recent work on the ways that African American artists have drawn from Yoruba art (Okediji 2003). And from personal experience, as a scholar of the Igbo, I am impressed with how many Igbo are teaching about African culture in American colleges and universities.

If African art and culture is now widely represented in America at a broad range of social levels, we see a profound change since the immediate post-independence period. It is my hope, perhaps idealistic, that these various forces bringing knowledge of African culture and its arts to America will somehow counteract the very poor impressions of Africa that exist today in the United States as a consequence of the continent's economic problems and its political and military conflicts. The African presence, even in the American hinterlands of Maine and Seattle, enriches the American experience. African arts and culture are now well represented in the four comers of the United States--in Florida, southern California, Maine, and Seattle, as well as in the center of this country.

To the youngest and next youngest generation of scholars of African art and culture in this country, all of this may simply be seen as part of the African diaspora with which they are quite familiar. But when I compare all of it to what existed in the US when I was a young scholar in the 1950s and 1960s, there have been remarkable developments. At those earlier dates there was virtually no movement of Africans to the US, though of course there were the descendants of African slaves, who, by and large, appeared at the time distant from Africa. The term "diaspora," so common today in scholarship with reference to Africans and their arts and cultures in the Americas (and even in the Middle East and Asia), was primarily employed with respect to Jews. There was little interest in Africa in the United States; its continent was seen as the under the influence of European countries. Only among some African Americans was there interest in Ethiopia and in its emperor, Haile Selassie, and concern about Africa among some African-American intellectuals, such as W.E.B. Dubois (1947). But other African-Americans scholars felt that the problems of race and black poverty in America were their main concern. There was some interest in Liberia, particularly among African Americans, which dated back to the nineteenth century. There was only a little interest in African cultural and linguistic traits in the New World, then called Africanisms, for example, in the work of Melville J. Herskovits (1941) and his students, and Lorenzo Dow Turner's study of the Gullah language (1949). Natural history museums, such as the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and the Field Museum in Chicago, held strong African collections, though they rarely were presented as art, rather as ethnographic objects. African art was only taught at a few universities, and African languages, so important for the understanding of the continent's art and culture, was even more rarely present at universities. The Harmon Foundation was the major institution in the United States concerned with modern African art, particularly in the 1960s, until it was disbanded in 1967 and its collection and records dispersed (Brown 1966, Kelly and Stanley 1993:580). Only a very few American scholars had been to Africa for research.

Since those times, there has been an impressive spread of knowledge of African art and culture at many different social and interest-group levels, spurred on by the increasing presence of Africans in the United States. Africa is no longer "dark" in our country, but it is being positively received here by some, though its conflicts, dictatorships, and corruption in post-independence years have reinforced earlier stereotypes of Africans as a continent of primitives, incapable of governing themselves. Now, both positive and negative views of Africa exist side by side, I am pleased to have been, for some fifty years, associated with the increasingly favorable views of Africa and its arts and culture in the United States. May Africa continue to blossom in America, as well as elsewhere in the world.

I wish to thank Oscar Mokeme, Aimee Bessire, and Julie McGee for valuable assistance in the preparation of this article.

(1.) The term Mbari harks back not only to the famous Igbo sculptural shrines, but also to Ulli Beier and the founding of the Mbari cultural centers in Oshogbo and Ibadan in the early 1960s and to other like-named ones that developed in Enugu and briefly in Germany at about the same time, all introducing contemporary Nigerian and African art to the public.

References cited

Bessire, Aimee. 2005. "Sukuma Figures, Boundaries, and the Arousal of Spectacle." African Arts 39 (1), 36-49, 93-4.

Brown, Evelyn S. 1966. African's Contemporary Art and Artists; a Review of Creative Activities in Painting, Sculpture, Ceramics and Crafts of Over 300 Artists Working in the Modern Industrialized Societies of Some of the Countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. New York: Harmon Foundation.

DuBois, W.E.B. 1947. The World and Africa; an Inquiry in the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History. New York: Viking Press.

Herskovits, Melville J. 1941. The Myth of the Negro Past. New York: Harper and Brothers.

Kelly, Bernice M. (comp.), and Janet L. Stanley (ed.). 1993. Nigerian Artists: A Who's Who and Bibliography. London: Hans Zen.

Kennedy, Jean. 1992. New Currents, Ancient Rivers: Contemporary African Artists in a Generation of Change. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Okediji, Moyo. 2003. The Shattered Gourd: Yoruba Forms in Twentieth Century American Art. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Turner, Lorenzo Dow. 1949. Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.