Roy Sieber: master before the changeless mirror 1923-2001. (in memoriam).

Roy Sieber is forever: expert eye, copious beard, reassuring arm around a worried graduate student, uncopiable mix of fellowship and authority. More than four hundred persons attended Roy's funeral in Bloomington last October. That means four hundred impressions of the man who put African art on the map in America.

Roy Sieber is the master of the material surround. He loved objects. He mastered their meanings and contexts. His eye was in harmony with his hand when he wrote, restoring to objects the life-giving essences of their time, place, and maker. He shared this passion and changed many lives.

Anita Glaze remembers the night Roy and Sophie invited her home for dinner: "... and when I went inside! There was Coptic art, stained glass, American antiques, Persian rugs, African sculpture and textiles and furniture." She went out with Roy and bought her first rug, a small Kazak, and then an antique. Roy showed her how to strip the antique down to its original layers and work it back up to perfection. Hidden in his gesture was a symbol of ideal scholarship.

In the process of becoming a world-class expert, Roy never forgot how to be generous. Both Glaze and Christopher Roy tragically lost parents, and Roy became a surrogate father to them. Not without reason would Rosalind Walker and Glaze affectionately refer to him as Papa Sieber. As Glaze recalls, "It was personal warmth plus professional discipline. He inspired you without being threatening."

Collectors admired him. But this did not deter Roy from pointing out the limitations of the tropism toward "patina, provenance, and purity." Social scientists loved him too, and considered him one of them on account of his fieldwork and rigor. Roy put history back into African visual studies, making documents move for the objects, and objects move for the documents, recovering the meanings hidden in time.

He was always ready to share what he knew, and what he knew was prodigious. I remember an encounter in the fall of 1967. I was preparing "African and Afro-American Art: The Transatlantic Tradition," my first exhibition, for Robert Goldwater and Douglas Newton. I had just collected in tidewater Georgia a small problem piece: a polished, dark-brown wooden spoon with the handle transformed into a short standing figure.

Two writers had already defined the piece as an African "survival" in the city of Savannah. I did not like the term survival. It made things sound isolated, static, and doomed. Plus there was no evidence as to provenance and maker other than that the spoon had turned up in a city with blacks. Nevertheless, I knew that if there was a trace of African influence in this object, Roy Sieber would be the best person to detect it. So I borrowed the spoon and I took it to Roy in the Hilton Hotel in New York. He gave it one look and said: "It's Ifugao." It was a rice spoon from northern Luzon in the Philippines. That was that. One less piece to write up. But it wasn't until that moment that I realized Sieber was as wise in Oceanic art as he was in African.

Roy and I were roommates in Dakar at the 1966 World Festival of Black Arts. Katherine Dunham, the choreographer, had asked me to give a small lecture on the history of New York mambo illustrated with a film. For some strange reason I felt that looking at frames, holding the reel up to the light in the bathroom, would better prepare me for the lecture the next morning. Roy burst into the bathroom at 3 a.m. to see what the hell was going on. He took in the film, spread like a celluloid serpent all over the tile floor, rolled his eyes, and went back to bed. We've been friends ever since.

Roy lives in his books. I keep coming back to them. First is Sculpture of Northern Nigeria (1961). It started a Sieber tradition: don't just write a catalogue--open up a new field while you're at it. I love that catalogue. I grew up on it. I love the map, black, sleek, and glowing, with place names and rivers in white, like marks cut on smoked glass. The beauty of the map and the beauty of the design were statements in themselves. This catalogue would inspire, very shortly, Arnold Rubin to work in this area and push the frontier out even farther.

There are perceptual gems in this book. Here is one of them: "The artist was conservative and committed to traditional modes. Yet from the evidence of the objects this was not an overwhelmingly restrictive deterrent" (p. 5). Here was a seed of the conference called "Individual Creativity and Tribal Norms" that was held four years later at UCLA, where Roy took on a Mesoamericanist for assuming that Aztec was higher that African. Show me some iron, said Sieber.

Sculpture of Northern Nigeria included women. Roy brought to our attention Azume, the superb Goemai potter. Wet clay in her hands turned into something appreciable--well-weighted coiffure, wide lidded eyes that surge with the spirit, and cicatrized signs of affiliation and well-being. Her genius was unique, and Roy reported the challenge: "[She] may be an instance of an unusual capability which survives only for the lifetime of the artists, is not transmitted as a craft and does not become part of the repertory of the tribe" (p. 12).

The catalogue is also armed with an early note to the effect that "tribal" boundaries could be permeable, allowing for cosmopolitan contacts: "It should be noted that carvings purchased from the Montol and Kanam were observed in use by the Goemai" (p. 12). Open boundaries. Sieber's students, Rene Bravmann and Mary Jo Arnoldi, would later richly elaborate on the phenomenon.

Roy in fact was challenging all kinds of assumptions--"tribal" isolation and its unchanging face, "anonymous" artists on tribal terrain. The truth was more interesting, and he documented it. The villagers of Kurgwi, in western Goemai, knew the name of the carver, Longte. The reason: he was a master, in demand and renowned. His kwomptem society figure dominates the cover of the catalogue.

Sieber's African Textiles and Decorative Arts (1972) was immediately indispensable. I could talk about textiles, armed with a book that worked. I started memorizing a Liberian man's robe with its six different stripe patterns, including one in tie-dye. I admired the multimirroring, the strip/stripe vibration in action. It stood in contrast to a Maninka hunter's dress whose back--the side most in need of spiritual protection--was laden with containers, small horns, skeletal strands, all bristling with medicine. Dress as antidote. Dress as defense system. Roy arose from the pages and gave me what I needed, especially this (p. 11):

   Where the impact of interior or exterior forces of change seems clear,
   those forces are noted .... Thus, more often than not, we find things from
   Europe and techniques from Islam: beads and cloths from Europe;
   silversmithing forms and looms from the east and north.

In an era when talk about alterity and slipped signifiers still seems important, to certain writers, rather than the lived experience of African artists, it is wonderful to have Roy's down-to-earth diction still with us.

There is also his gift for telling a story in one single phrase, as if Tito Rodriguez had Sieber in mind when he sang, "Una frase todo un cuento." For example, apropos of "design accumulation" in Yoruba beading, Roy told us that "each large bead [has] its own circle of smaller beads" (p. 17). Roy was virtually talking about fractals, headed in the direction of the future.

One' of my favorite photographs in African Textiles: a portrait of an imam, keeper of the mosque at Larabanga in Ghana. He is wearing an equivalent of Cubism, "aspectual simultaneity" built up in dress. The planes of cloth, one yellow, one striped, clashing with passages of crimson and green, suggest that certain Africans have been and shall be "Cubist" forever.

From the elegance of the imam, Sieber takes us to the cold stare of a bare-chested Bwaka man in Central Africa. His prominent keloids attest to his laughter at pain; they are the markers of his bravery.

The plate on page 191 for me was an epiphany: a men's weave from West Africa with "seemingly random placement of pattern. However, the careful matching of the ends of the cloth dispels the impression of an uncalculated overall design." Having been baptized by syncopes--boogie and mambo--and having had Alan Merriam teach me how Swazi men off-beat their shouts between each drum pulse, I knew what I was looking at. The plate that most spoke to me, in this regard, was a Ghanaian men's weave on page 194 (Fig. 1). Here the glitter of multimetric effects emerged in overweave patterns resulting from added pairs of heddles. Adding heddles to the loom was like adding drums to the dance.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

African Furniture and Household Objects (1980) was another landmark. No one else could have done it. From the very first photograph, a Meje woman's house with hearth, mortar, and pots, we realized we were in the hands of a voyaging master, a master who would teach us the splendor of African utilitarian objects.

Sieber took material culture into art history commanding a wider horizon. In 1996 I attended "Recycled, Re-Seen," a remarkable exhibition at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe on toys and other objects made from recycled objects. Roy clearly saw toys as a language. In his 1980 catalogue he carefully noted "inventively constructed, closely emulated toy versions of boats, motor cars, trucks, and airplanes" (p. 91). The boats were controlled by sticks in the hands of the young owners, like the Samburu boy--illustrated in the same book--playing with a toy automobile in Kenya, a material pet on a leash.

Roy was an excellent photographer. Witness his shots of Shai potters at work, fire and smoke everywhere, holding steaming vessels on long poles. And some of his captions are interpretative haikus: "Cassava sifter. Zaire. Lower area is twined, becoming twill plaiting at shoulder, and changing to wickerwork at neck" (p. 226). The more Roy makes us look at objects, the more their true voice is revealed. The maker of this sifter (Fig. 2) builds an impression by complicating transitions of detail. There are ways of suggesting that life is being, that life is becoming, without being wordy. There is peace, too, in the making of ordinary objects, where you master the medium and the medium masters you, in an aura of concentration and calm. Peace man, art man, object man, we love you, Roy Sieber. You work through our minds forever.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

ROBERT FARRIS THOMPSON is the Colonel John Trumbull Professor of African Art History at Yale University and a consulting editor of African Arts.