Embodying the Sacred in Yoruba Art: featuring the Bernard and Patricia Wagner Collection: a case study in museum practice.

Every man lives in two realms, the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live.... This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem, confronting modern man. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul....

Western civilization is particularly vulnerable at this moment, for our material abundance has brought us neither peace of mind nor serenity of spirit....

This does not mean that we must turn back the clock of scientific progress. No one can overlook the wonders that science has wrought for our lives.... But our moral and spiritual "lag" must be redeemed. When scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men. When we foolishly minimize the internal of our lives and maximize the external, we sign the warrant for our own day of doom.

Our hope for creative living in this world house that we have inherited lies in our ability to re-establish the moral ends of our lives in personal character and social justice. Without this spiritual and moral reawakening we shall destroy ourselves in the misuse of our own instruments.

--Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968:5)

This quote, from King's essay "The World House" was read by a cross-section of the city's population at a special event, Atlanta Reads King, at the Rialto Theatre on March 4, 2008. The reading began at precisely 6:01 PM, to commemorate King's assassination at exactly that moment in time, forty years earlier. King's words parallel Yoruba ideas regarding aye and orun, this world and beyond, and ori ode and ori inu, the physical head and the inner head--concepts highlighted in "Embodying the Sacred in Yoruba Art Featuring the Collection of Bernard and Patricia Wagner," which was on view at the High Museum from December 22, 2007, through April 21, 2008 (Fig. 1).

"Embodying the Sacred" is a collaborative project co-organized by the High Museum and The Newark Museum. Following its presentation at the Newark Museum (June 6-August 24, 2008), the exhibition traveled to Virginia Commonwealth University (January-March 2009) and the Ackland Museum, Chapel Hill, North Carolina (Fall 2009). The exhibition was co-curated by Carol Thompson, Fred and Rita Richman Curator of African Art, High Museum, and Christa Clarke, Curator, Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific at the Newark Museum. Babatunde Lawal, Professor of Art History at Virginia Commonwealth University, used the opportunity to revisit and expand on the theme of "Art for Life's Sake: Life for Art's Sake," which he first presented as an inaugural lecture and published by Obafemi Awolowo University in 1987, as the basis for his contribution to the exhibition catalog there, extending its relevance into the twenty-first century. Most importantly, the exhibition provides an opportunity for the viewing public to encounter works of art in the public domain for the first time, as it secured important gifts from the Wagner collection for both museums, in equal portion.

The exhibition is a tribute to the generosity of Bernard and Patricia Wagner, their long-term commitment to Yoruba art, and their close collaboration with the African art dealer Eric Robertson. As Wagner often discussed with Thompson, while he did occasionally purchase from other African art dealers, such as Charles Davis, Charles Jones, Norman Hurst, and Jim Willis, he worked most closely with Eric Robertson to build, over the course of many decades, an African art collection with a particular focus on Yoruba art, all the while with an eye to eventually placing this collection in a museum in a city with a large population of peoples of African ancestry, such as Newark and Atlanta. This essay's purpose is to examine the Atlanta presentation of this multi-venue project to demonstrate how the exhibition, as it participated in broad discourses that shape museum practice, also responded to its local environment.

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"Embodying the Sacred in Yoruba Art," as it was presented at the High Museum, offers an opportunity for reflections on the construction of what Steven Lavine refers to as the ideological character of a museum display by posing what is arguably at the core of contemporary museum practice: how is the viewer engaged and how does an exhibitionary voice emerge? (Lavine 1991:151). "Embodying the Sacred" is the third exhibition of Yoruba art to be presented at the High Museum. In 1980, the museum mounted "African Artistry: Process and Aesthetics in Yoruba Art, An Exhibition of Yoruba Art from the Arnett Collection," curated by Henry Drewal. In 1991 the High presented "Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought" curated by Henry Drewal, Jack Pemberton, and Rowland Abiodun, organized by the Museum for African Art, New York. The "Nine Centuries" exhibition was much more ambitious than either "African Artistry" or "Embodying the Sacred" with important loans from public and private collections, national and international, including antiquities from Nigerian museums. "Embodying the Sacred" is far more modest in scope, presenting works primarily, though not exclusively, from a single private collection supplemented with works from the High and Newark Museums' collections. Still, this most recent project reinforces Fred Myer's observation that exhibitions are active processes of cultural production that can serve instructive, transformative, and educational purposes: unique interventions, not simply repetitions.

Presented in the 2,400 square-foot space adjacent to the Fred and Rita Richman Gallery, located at the 16th Street Level of the Wieland Pavilion, this was the first special exhibition of African art to be presented in the High Museum's newly expanded Renzo Piano-designed galleries, which opened in November 2005 (Fig. 2). "Embodying the Sacred," though presented in one of the Museum's smaller exhibition spaces, proved to be a great draw, receiving extensive press coverage--local, regional, national, and international--and bringing more visitors to the Lower Level galleries than ever before. The exhibition was presented in conjunction with two high-profile exhibitions, "Louvre Atlanta" and "Inspiring Impressionism" along with other secondary shows.

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"Embodying the Sacred" provides an opportunity to consider, as Myers argues, the "museum process of recontextualization as a broader activity of cultural or discursive production in which the representation of culture is significant" (2006:505). It does this by looking at Yoruba culture through the lens of art and religious belief. The exhibition is structured around three broad themes: "Orilade: The Head is a Crown" "Ami Orisa: Altar Arts and Sacred Symbols," and "Odunde Odunjo: Masquerade Festivals" to include ritual and ceremonial objects, decorative and utilitarian objects that highlight vernacular industry, and objects used to convey social status. Works of art are grouped to contextualize original social meanings and uses related to the three themes: arts that glorify the head, personal and political; altar arts; and masquerades (Fig. 3). However, reflecting their status as fine art objects in a Western art museum, here the works are most highly valued as aesthetic objects.

The seventy-four objects on display include a diverse range of forms, not only sculpture made of wood, but beadwork, textiles-including an intricately patterned, indigo-dyed cloth from the High Museum's collection (Fig. 4)--ceramics, metalwork, and even a non-figurative accumulative "shrine sculpture" made of horns, cowries, and leather. In addition, the exhibition includes an unusually lavish profusion of cowrie shells, a culturally loaded signifier throughout Africa and the African Diaspora, on the front panels of both egungun masquerades (Figs. 5-6), adorning the Esu staff (Fig. 7) and vestment pictured on the catalog cover, covering the house of the head shrines (Figs. 8-9), and on the Orisa Oko sheath. At the same time, as a display of primarily sacred arts, the exhibition reproduces an ambiguity of transposed sites, old and new cultural contexts, and the reflexive philosophical underpinnings that art critic Arthur Danto discusses in his essay "Artifact and Art" (1988:18-32). By presenting such a broad range of richly textured forms, the exhibition gently challenges art/artifact distinctions while it re-presents the recurring question regarding universal aesthetic values.

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At the High, as everywhere, institutional constraints impact exhibitions. The Highs exhibition philosophy adheres to a "less is more" aesthetic. With a ratio of seventy-four objects to a 2,400 square-foot space within this exhibition, each work is given plenty of room to breathe, thereby expanding the "aura" of each work exponentially. The overall effect is of buoyant lightness. Similarly, in keeping with Piano's architectural style, the didactic information supporting the exhibition is spare. This accords with the High Museum's institutional policy that limits text panels to 150 words and extended labels to 75 words, with the latter allowed for a maximum of approximately thirty percent of all objects on display (others get identification labels only). Key didactic information is translated into Yoruba, including tonal accents, to offer further insights into art and aesthetics from a Yoruba point-of-view. At the High, the richly illustrated catalogue was also available for gallery reading.

Within the High's presentation of "Embodying the Sacred," the concise didactics were supplemented by a large photomural of an If a diviner, made from a 1975 image provided by Marilyn Houlberg (Fig. 10). The photomural, which helped humanize the space, was flanked by a divination board on one side and house of the head shrines on the other, to point to how such objects function at the intersection of aye and orun (this world and beyond). The central positioning of the image of a larger-than-life-size person makes concrete the idea that human intervention is required to activate these material objects. It is through the spoken word, music, dance, and songs of diviners, priests, priestesses, and ordinary people, that the performative aspects of these objects art are enlivened.

Within the exhibition, the formality and "white cubeness" that tall, white museum walls suggest might be alienating or inhibiting to uninitiated museum visitors, narrowly circumscribing their experiences. The use of a cool, lavender blue as an accent color helped mitigate against this possibility, adding an air of serenity to the space. As described in the introductory wall text, in Yoruba terms, art has the power to fa oju mora ('magnetize the eyes') becoming awowo-tun-wo ('that which compels repeated gaze'). The rich diversity of color, scale, shape, pattern, and texture of works of art included in the exhibition pulled people in, indeed, magnetizing visitors' eyes. People stayed in the exhibition space, sometimes for several hours, and often returned repeatedly. Highly decorated works such as the Crown of Obatala (ade Obatala), the Leadership Sword and Sheath (udamalore), and the Figure of a Bata Drummer (alubata; Fig. 11) attracted close scrutiny. As a security officer noted, "People could see they were made with love." Large-scale, dramatically spectacular works such as the Epa Headdress (Oloko) and the Egungun Masquerade Costumes, among others, were strategically placed to lead viewers deeper into the exhibition. To provide a more direct, immediate experience to the viewer, Plexiglass vitrines were kept to a minimum.

One might argue that, in its broad strokes, the exhibition presented a totalizing narrative that failed to account for particularities and differences among Yoruba peoples, closer examination reveals otherwise. With its stated goal being "to explore relationships between art and the spiritual world" the exhibition was conceived as an introductory survey and its catalog a basic primer on Yoruba art. As the introductory text panel states,

   Today, there are over 25 million Yoruba, united by religious
   beliefs, language, and a common tradition of origin rooted in the
   institution of divine kingship. The city of Ile-Ife, the ancient
   capital where the ruler's palace is still located today, was
   urbanized as early as the 8th century and became a major center of
   artistic production by the 11th century. An estimated one-sixth of
   all African-Americans are of Yoruba ancestry. Atlanta has one of
   the largest Yoruba communities in the United States, part of a
   burgeoning diaspora of Nigerian immigrants to the United States.

Similarly, the exhibitions timeframe is also broad, as this introductory text concludes, "Unless otherwise noted, all works were made by Yoruba artists of Nigeria or the Republic of Benin between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century."

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Further, while one might argue that more might have been done to contextualize syncretism as a congruent aspect of cultural dynamism in Yoruba societies, one work, in particular, belies this conclusion. The white-beaded crown in the form of a white-powdered wig (orikogbofo) calls attention to issues of historical specificity and to the colonial encounter. As described in the object label,

   Some crowns reflect the personal taste of a king. Orikogbofo
   (casual headgear), normally worn indoors, does not have a beaded
   veil. These crowns take diverse forms, some resembling
   white-powdered wigs worn by African judges during the colonial era.
   Such innovative new designs were developed during the twentieth
   century, when many monarchs converted to Islam and Christianity and
   began to appear in public without the beaded veil.

Likewise, while the exhibition might be critiqued for being essentialist in its seeking of "authenticity," the inclusion of this crown complicates this conundrum, consciously engaging these eternal debates. Undeniably, the many visually stunning, finely crafted works of art included within the exhibition exude Stephen Greenblatt's idea of "resonance and wonder" (1991).

Also, importantly, the exhibition embraced the contemporary pulse of Yoruba societies through the programming that took place within the exhibition space. On Saturday, March 29, when the Erintunde Youth Institute visited the Museum, the memorial complex Greenblatt proposes as a framework for museum practice was fully enacted. This day recalled interactions with the "live" altars presented in "Face of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americas" the most popular exhibit the Museum for African Art ever organized, curated by Robert Farris Thompson, as it was presented in New York City and throughout its extensive tour.

The word erintunde means "laughter returns" This newly founded institute, a coalition of African American families that practice Yoruba religion in Atlanta, is named after a 10-year old boy recently killed crossing the street on his way home from school. He was the son of the Babalawo Ralph Cheo Thurman, who presided over the Saturday afternoon program organized by Charmaine Minniefield, Oya priest, and attended by more than twenty-five Atlanta priests, elders, and their families (many of whom had traveled to Nigeria to participate in the annual Osun festival). The deceased boy's orisa was Obatala, embodied in the white beaded crown that served as a signature image for the exhibition (Fig. 12). Among the Yoruba deities, Obatala signifies wisdom, purity, clarity, reason, and calm inner strength. Obatala is the oldest of the orisa and the creator of human beings, revered as a judge, wise elder, and leader.

To commemorate his short life, Erintunde's name has been added to the credit line for the white beaded crown, now in the High Museum's collection, along with the names of the donors, Bernard and Patricia Wagner. In addition, his family is creating a headstone for his grave inspired by the Memory Jar in the Fred and Rita Richman Gallery, with a white elephant at its center, another of Obatala's attributes (Fig. 13). On the day of the Erintunde Youth Institute's visit to the Museum, Erintunde's photo was displayed on an easel next to the auditorium where the program began. Then, as members of the Institute toured "Embodying the Sacred" and the Richman Gallery, they spontaneously sang songs to the various deities, including Osun, Yemoja, Sango, Egungun, and Esu, consecrating the High Museum's African art galleries as never before (Fig. 14). The majority of the approximately seventy-five people who participated in the program, all from Atlanta, had never before visited the Museum (Fig. 15). The day's activities countered what Susan Vogel describes as "the purity of the aetheticizing museum presentation of African art as increasingly vitiated, sterile, and false" (1994:115).

From another perspective, "Embodying the Sacred" as presented at the High was distinctive in the way that it highlighted gender balance through its object selection. The exhibition included abundant bird imagery, representative of the important role of women in Yoruba spirituality, with birds perched at the pinnacle of the Epa mask, atop the crown for Obatala, surmounting the egungun from the Highs collection, at the center of the egungun from Newark's collection, atop the edan Ogboni gifted to the High, adorning the Osun fan, on the finial of the brass staff gifted to the High, on the blacksmith's staff, and of course, on the iron staffs for Osanyin.

The Yoruba beaded vessel recently gifted to the High (Fig. 16), surmounted by birds, solidly decorated with glass beads, probably once belonged to a member of the Yoruba royalty or a high-ranking priest or priestess. Its bird imagery points to the role of the king as intermediary between his subjects and the orisa, in the same way that a bird moves between earth and sky. At the same time, the bird imagery also alludes to the mystical power that the supreme deity, Olodumare, gave to the first woman in the form of a bird enclosed in a calabash, to enable her to counter the chauvinism and muscular advantage of men. Likewise, Olodumare's breath is described as taking the form of a bird when entering the human body inside the womb or leaving it after death. In this vessel, one bird stands atop two hemispheres supported by a central shaft encircled by two birds, as though relaying metaphysical powers from the celestial to the terrestrial realm. Susan and Carl Cofer gifted this work to the High in honor of Karol and Kevin Mason, in gratitude for providing inspiration to Susan Cofer as she was working on the portrait of the Mason twins commissioned to celebrate their fiftieth birthday in August, 2007.

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The portrait of Karol and Kevin Mason commissioned from Susan Cofer was inspired by the Yoruba ibeji from the Richman collection included in "Embodying the Sacred" (Figs. 17-18). In the catalog for an exhibition of her work at the University of Georgia, Cofer describes how, while visiting the High Museum with several friends, when she first learned about the Yoruba tradition of ibeji,

the hair on my arms stood up ... the twin sculptures were the scale of my own work. They were male and female. They radiated enormous power. This museum experience seemed a fortuitous gift, coming from somewhere outside normal channels. Those twin figures were calling out to me.... I knew I had to learn more about this art and about Africa (Thompson 2008:19-20).

As emphasized in "Embodying the Sacred," in Yoruba culture a person's head is valued as a seat of intelligence and site of perception. Emphasis on the head in Yoruba art has both theological and political importance. The Yoruba word orilade ('the head is a crown') is a metaphor for this relationship. The head is to an individual what Olodumare (the supreme being) is to the cosmos--a crown and a source of power. As suggested in the quote by Martin Luther King, Jr., at the beginning of this essay, "every man lives in two realms." According to Yoruba religious belief system, those realms refer to the two aspects of the head, the outer and the inner. The outer aspect refers to ori ode (the physical head) molded by the artist-deity Obatala, and identifies the visible self. The inner aspect refers to ori inu (a spiritual core) that generates the life-giving emi (the vital spirit, or the power to make things happen) in an individual.

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Seen against the backdrop of this rich cultural history, Cofer's portraits of Karol and Kevin Mason, inspired in part by Yoruba ibeji, almost become altars. Loaded with multiple signifiers, these twin portraits, despite the fact that they were made by a "white" woman artist, function as "head praise" to Karol and Kevin Mason (Thompson 2008:19). Susan Cofer's portraits of Karol and Kevin Mason, like all her portraits, capture the subject's spirit in a most uncanny way, suggesting that, from a Yoruba point of view, Cofer has moved beyond this world to tap superhuman or supernatural powers. She has become Atlanta's high priestess of portraiture.

On April 21, the High celebrated the closing of "Embodying the Sacred" on the occasion of the forth annual dinner of The David C. Driskell Prize in African American Art and Art History. At the reception preceding dinner, guests including a diverse cross-section of Atlanta's social and political elite, with Mayor Shirley Franklin and Stephanie Hughley, Executive Producer of the National Black Arts Festival, in attendance. On that evening, Hughley told Thompson that for her and her grandchildren, seeing this exhibition was especially gratifying, since, like approximately one-sixth of all African Americans, her grandmother was of Yoruba ancestry. She learned this when NBAF partnered with African Ancestry, Inc. to offer people of African descent the opportunity to trace their lineage through The DNA Project: Find Your Roots, during the 2007 Festival (although the accuracy of such DNA tests has been contested).

As these anecdotes suggest, in the end, "Embodying the Sacred" achieved its emphasis on the poetics of museum display by mirroring what Elaine Heumann Gurian has described as the theatricality of exhibition production (1991:176-90). The viewing audience is not only empowered to look at the displayed objects in an aestheticizing way and to be inspired by them but also to form independent opinions to make the works of art relevant to their own lives. In this way, the exhibition became exemplar as a collaborative project reflecting the contributions of a broad constituency.

Finally, the exhibition reinforces Shelley Ruth Butler's optimistic accounts of exhibiting culture in its focus on the role of the museum as a site of public education and dialogue between diverse and multicultural citizens, each sensitive to the other's viewpoints, while at once recognizing and embracing our shared humanity (2000:74). The exhibitionary voice therefore emerges in the collaboration between exhibition producers and concerned constituencies, and in the encounter between the displayed objects and the multiple gazes of multiple publics.

References cited

Butler, Shelley Ruth. 2000. "The Politics of Exhibiting Culture: Legacies and Possibilities;' Museum Anthropology 23 (3):74.

Danto, Arthur C. 1988. "Artifact and Art:' In ART/artifact: African Art in Anthropology Collections, pp. 18-32. New York: The Center for African Art.

Drewal, Henry John. 1980. African Artistry: Technique and Aesthetics in Yoruba Sculpture. Atlanta: High Museum of Art.

Drewal, Henry John, and John Pemberton III. 1989. Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought, ed. Allen Wardwell. New York: The Center for African Art and Harry N. Abrams.

Greenblatt, Stephen. 199a. "Resonance and Wonder." In Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, pp. 42-56. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Gurian, Elaine Heumann. 1991. "Noodling with Exhibition Opportunities" In Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, pp. 176-190. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

King, Jr., Martin Luther. 1968. "The World House." Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? Boston: Beacon Press, from The World House Project (www.thewordlhouse.org). Accessed March 11, 2008.

Lavine, Steven D. 1991. "Museum Practices." In Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, p. 151. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Lawal, Babatunde. 1987. Art for Life's Sake: Life for Art's Sake. Inaugural Lecture Series 70. Ile-Ife, Nigeria: Obafemi Awolowo University Press.

Myers, Fred. 2006. "The Complicity of Cultural Production: The Contingencies of Performance in Globalizing

Museum Practices:' In Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, ed. Ivan Karp et al., pp. 504-35. Durham NC: Duke University Press.

Vogel, Susan. 1994. "Portrait of a Museum in Practice." In Exhibition-ism: Museums and African Art, ed. Mary Nooter Roberts and Susan Vogel, pp. 115. New York: Museum for African Art.

Ross, Doran H. 2002. Gold of the Akan from the Glassell Collection. Houston TX: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Thompson, Carol. 2008. "A Peripatetic Gallery of Playful, Provocative Portraits: The Art of Susan Seydel Cofer, Atlanta's Very Own Florine Stettheimer." In Learning to Love the Species: Susan Seydel Cofer, pp. 19-20. Atlanta: Circle B Press.

Thompson, Robert Farris. 1993. Face of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americas. New York: Museum for African Art.

Carol Thompson is Fred and Rita Richman Curator of African Art, High Museum, Atlanta. [e-mail]

Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi is a graduate student sof African art history at Emory University.

Rebekah Mejorado is Curatorial Assistant to the African Art Department, High Museum.