Material Differences: Art and Identity in Africa.

The Museum for African Art New York, New York April 10 October 6, 2003

Entering the exhibition "Material Differences: Art and Identity in Africa" at the Museum for African Art, I was immediately struck by the dramatic exhibition design created by Yolande Daniels of the architectural firm SUMO in New York City. Hanging panels of boldly colored and textured paper provided floating spatial divisions that subtly undulated with the visitor's movement through the galleries. The interplay of the suspended panels with the wails and pedestals equally saturated in shades of maroon, golden yellow, and fire red tempered by cooler shades of gray and white produced an energetic environment for the artworks. In "Material Differences," curator Frank Herreman presented 135 objects from public and private collections, photographs, and video footage that illustrated how we can learn about African social, cultural, and religious practices and value systems on the basis of the materials from which the objects are made. The thematically organized spaces of this exhibition followed a zigzagging path that guided the visitor from one gallery into the next, from one material to the next, revealing the multilayered meanings of materials in African art production.

The conceptual framework of the exhibition, that material is meaning, was explained by the introductory text. A display of three commemorative heads from the kingdom of Benin made of brass, terracotta, and wood visually summarized that premise by illustrating how the material differences of these three portraits echoed the different methods of production, use, meaning, and hierarchical importance inherent in each object.

Following the introduction, the exhibition was laid out according to thematic categories that acquainted the viewer with various materials and methods of art production in Africa. The first section, "Revealing Forms through Subtraction," examined the material significance of wood, ivory, and stone sculptures created through subtractive processes. The section included familiar examples of African sculpture such as a carved wooden Mumuye figure and miniature Lega ivories. A welcome newcomer to this group of familiar friends was an elegantly schematic stone figure from Great Zimbabwe.

The next section, "Transforming through Fire," presented metal and ceramic objects whose symbolic and social significance is dictated by their physical transformation through fire. As in the previous section, the gallery spaces were subdivided according to material, including the various metals exemplified through a Fon iron figure of Ogun or Gu, a selection of Benin bronzes, a dazzling array of Akan gold display arts, and Yoruba equestrian figures made of copper alloys. Among the ceramic works featured in "Transforming through Fire" were an Akan terracotta head, an Ijebu figure of an Ogboni or Oshugbo chief, a Ga'anda ancestral pot, and a Luo storage vessel. The inclusion of contemporary ceramic pieces by Nesta Nala, Kouame Kakaha, and Magdalene Odundo provided an interesting perspective not offered in other sections of the exhibition. Their presentation provided a good opportunity for comparison between older "traditional" uses of material and methods and the "contemporary" forms and methods used in more recent years in Africa and the Diaspora.

The vivid gallery spaces continued with "The Ephemera/and the 'Un-Transportable,'" which focused on those art forms created from impermanent materials including Bwa leaf masks made for single occasions, Zombe fiber and feather masks used in initiation performances, and untransportable structures such as Igbo mbari houses. Although the entire exhibition was dedicated to the late Roy Sieber, one of the fathers of African art history, it is this section that paid real tribute to this great scholar. Sieber's milestone research--featured in "The Ephemeral and the 'Un-Transportable'" by a reconstruction of southeastern Ghanaian Pram Pram ground paintings made of millet gruel, millet flour, and drops of water opened the discipline to art forms outside the Western canon (see Sieber 1972, 1980). As in the museum's past exhibition, "Hair in African Art and Culture" (Herreman & Sieber 2000), Herreman deserves praise for presenting the public with a few examples of ephemeral and "un-transportable" arts, which too often are completely excluded from exhibitions because of the challenges they pose to display practices. The successful reconstruction of the Pram Pram drawings clearly demonstrated how such issues coil and should be overcome.

The last section, "Enhancing Power through the Accumulation of Materials," featured objects whose power and efficacy are derived from the metaphoric associations of the specific materials they combine. In this gallery, Herreman presented the usual assortment of power figures from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a Chokwe divination basket, an Ejagham emblem of the leopard spirit, and a Senufo kafigeledio figure, among other accretions of material and meaning.

In its general survey of materials, methods of production, and associated symbolism, "Material Differences" provided a digestible amount of information for novices of African art. For the seasoned viewer or specialist, however, its concentration on overly familiar research material, themes, and objects left much to be desired in the way of innovation or challenge to outdated paradigms. "Material Differences" departed quite drastically from the institution's original mission to liberate itself from the generalists' approach and to foster a deeper exploration of complex concepts, untested hypotheses, and challenging exegeses of African art and history (Vogel 1994). The categorization of objects by material was uncomfortably reminiscent of the colonial or ethnographic mode of presentation. Moreover, the choice of objects resounded with overtones of the Western value system through its preferential treatment of figurative art, hailing mostly from west and central Africa. While some interesting nonfigurative works were exhibited in "Transforming through Fire," such as a Dogon iron assemblage and a Luba bow stand, the figurative bias was palpably apparent in the display of power figures from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Nonfigurative power bundles, sacks, shells, pots, and other such accumulative containers are pervasive throughout central Africa, but they were absent here. It is baffling that an exhibition on material differences in African art would feature a Bembe cloth figure but exclude comparative attention to the exquisite two dimensional African cloths readily available in public and private collections--a subtle yet disturbing persistence of the Western value system.

Despite the exhibition's tribute to baba Sieber, "Material Differences" served more as a precis of twentieth-century exhibition history than a representation of the kinds of nascent winds of change that Sieber fostered through out his life. This reviewer laments, most particularly, the opportunity missed to expand our understanding of the diversity of material and method beyond the Western canon of African art. The exclusion of such ubiquitous (and culturally significant) arts as textiles, basketry, beadwork, leatherwork, and gourd work, among others, echoes the neglect shown these materials throughout the twentieth century--in spite of Sieber's advocacy for change. In the sporadic cases where these forsaken media were discussed, it was in reference to their secondary role in the construction of masks or figures, not as art forms in and of themselves. While pottery (also a neglected stepchild in the canon) seems to have finally come into its own in this exhibition, only one basket was featured as a "basket" and then only in didactic comparison with a ceramic pot from the Cameroon Grasslands. (1)

It is unfortunate that Herreman did not cull the research, fieldwork, and academic accomplishments of the new generation of scholars who--following Sieber's example--have broken away from canonical models of the past. I low satisfying it would have been to see unfamiliar ephemera such as a Yoruba aale, imagery of "un-transportable" Lozi pageantry, a reconstruction of accumulative arts from a Vodun shrine, or an installation of Shambaa medicinal accretions (ughanga) in this exhibition on "material differences." (2) These are only a few of the existing art forms that have been researched recently by emerging scholars whose work reflects Sieber's inclusive vision. Given the ease with which scholars can now inquire, through the H-AfrArts listserve, about each others' work--even before that information has been published--there seems to be little reason why new research should not be incorporated into current exhibitions of African art.

Complementing "Material Differences: Art and Identity in Africa," an additional installation, "Material Differences in Contemporary Art," was presented in the museum's Focus Gallery. It featured a small selection of works by Arman, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, John Crawford, Isamu Noguchi, Magdalene Odundo, Tom Otterness, and Martin Puryear, whose choices of material--as in the African installation dictate the purpose, form, and conceptual foundations of their work. Here, too I commend Herreman for this comparative addition to the exhibition. One now hopes that future presentations at the Museum for African Art will commit more boldly to incorporating more "contemporary" work within the installations of "traditional" art as a way of demonstrating the continued vibrancy and inventiveness that characterize African art.

The catalogue (180 pp., 10 b/w & 154 color photos, 4 illustrations), edited by Frank Herreman, is published by the Museum for African Art, New York and Snoeck-Ducaju & Zoon, Gent (2003); $65 hardcover, $35 softcover. The catalogue includes contributions by Herman Burssens, Michelle Chadeisson, Herbert M. Cole, William J. Dewey, Perkins Foss, Paula Ben-Amos Girshick, Manuel A. Jordan, Constantine Petridis, Christopher D. Roy, and Jerome Vogel.

(1.) A Chokwe divination basket (ngombo) was also included in tire exhibition. However, the importance of basketry as a material was overshadowed by the significance of the container's other parts: miniature wood figures, shells, bones, quills, etc.

(2.) See, for example, Doris (2002) on Yoruba aale, Milbourne (2003) on pageantry in Barotseland, Rush (1997) on Vodun accumulative arts, and Thompson (1999) on Shambaa arts of healing.

References cited

Doris, David Todd. 2002. "Vigilant Things: The Strange Fates of Ordinary Objects in Southwestern Nigeria." Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University.

Milbourne, Karen Elizabeth. 2003. "Diplomacy in Motion: Art, Pageantry and the Politics of Creativity in Barotseland," Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Iowa.

Rush, Dana Lynn. 1997. "Vodun Vortex: Accumulative Arts, Histories, and Religious Consciousnesses along Coastal Benin." Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Iowa.

Sieber, Roy. 1980. African Furniture and Household Objects. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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

Sieber, Roy and Frank Herreman (eds.). 2000. Hair in African Art and Culture. New York: The Museum for African Art; and Munich: Prestel.

Thompson, Barbara. 1999. "Kiuza Mpheho (Return of the Winds): The Arts of Healing among the Shambaa Peoples of Tanzania." Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Iowa.

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

Barbara Thompson is the curator of African, Oceanic and Native American Collections at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Her research focuses on healing, art, and performance in northeastern Tanzania and on ceramics from around the African continent.