The African collection at the Hood Museum of Art.

The history of the Hood Museum of Art and its African collection is intricately entwined with the unique character of Dartmouth College, the nation's ninth oldest college and a member of the Ivy League (Bass 1985:16). Dartmouth College was founded in 1769 by Rev. Eleazar Wheelock, a Congregational minister from Connecticut, in the town of Hanover in the Royal Province of New Hampshire. Chartered by King George III, the college provided

   for the education and instruction of youth of the Indian
   Tribes in this land in reading, writing, and all parts of
   learning which shall appear necessary and expedient for
   civilizing and christianizing children of pagans, as well as
   in all liberal arts and sciences, and also of English youth
   and any others. (1)

Because he considered the primary mission of his school, as outlined in the Charter of Dartmouth College, "to encourage the laudable and charitable design of spreading Christian knowledge among the savages of our American wilderness, and also that the best means of education be established in our province of New Hampshire, for the benefit of said province," Rev. Wheelock chose as the college's motto vox clamantis in deserto, "a voice crying in the wilderness" (Isaiah 40:3). In this context, the "voice" represented the expression of religion in the darkness of an unsettled region, particularly because Dartmouth's remote location in the midst of New England's "wilderness" inspired a rigorous desire to further the understanding between life, God, and his creation. Echoing the excitement of colonizing a New World, the allegiance of America's intellectuals to the Enlightenment, and the religious devotion of New England's European settlers, the college's mission engaged Dartmouth students with classifiable examples of the "natural and moral world" embodied by scientific, ethnographic, archaeological, and natural history teachings and specimens (Bass 1985:10). These were the same perspectives that invited and directed the humble beginnings of a young Dartmouth College museum.

The Multifarious History of an Ethnographic Collection

The first reference to the development of a museum at Dartmouth College dates to 1772, when David McClure wrote to Rev. Wheelock that he had "collected a few curious Elephants Bones found about six hundred miles down the Ohio, for the young Museum at Dartmouth," thereafter referred to as the Dartmouth College Museum (Bowen 1958:1). (2) The beginning of the museum's interest in the African continent came soon thereafter. As recorded in the Worcester Massachusetts Spy and the Boston Columbian Centinel, on September 7, 1796, Elias Hasket Derby of Salem, Massachusetts, gave the Dartmouth College Museum a "large number of curiosities," including a stuffed African zebra (Bass 1985:13). According to Dartmouth lore, "unlike a properly regulated museum piece, [the zebra] was in the habit of appearing in incongruous places, such as the roof of the chapel or the belfry of the 'College' [Dartmouth Hall], thus requiring laborious transportation back to its normal abode" (Richardson 1932:251-2).

Dartmouth's interest in material culture from the African continent is directly linked to the history of one of its students, John Ledyard (1751-89), who attended the college for one year in 1772 and was the first American in Egypt. After shipping with Captain Cook to the Pacific and crossing Siberia, Ledyard was engaged by the African Association of London to explore the Nile and the Niger but died in Cairo at the outset of that trip. On August 15, 1788, Ledyard wrote from Alexandria, Egypt,

   A pillar called the pillar of Pompey & an obelisk called
   Cleopatra's are now almost the only remains of great Antiquity.
   They are both and particularly the former noble subjects
   to see and contemplate & certainly more captivating for
   the contrasting dessert [sic] and forlorn prospects around
   them (Oliver 1979).

Museum records confirm that before 1810, a Mr. S. Dinsmore donated two syenite fragments of Pompey's pillar from Alexandria--one of which is still extant in the museum (13.158.4255). (3) Although the actual date of the acquisition of these two fragments remains unknown, it is possible that Ledyard's 1788 reference to this very same pillar was the impetus behind the collection and subsequent acquisition of these fragments by the museum.

The fascination with ancient Egyptian "curiosities" in these early years of the Dartmouth College Museum continued when, in 1838, Frederick Hall (Class of 1803) (4) donated an Egyptian mummy mask (Fig. 1) from the Old Kingdom, 2465-2150 B.C.; two fresco fragments from the Tomb of Kings in the Lower Chamber, Thebes, 18th Dynasty; a mummy cloth with embalming; and other objects no longer extant in the museum. Although these objects are of little scholarly interest today, they are wonderful examples of the kinds of "curios" that were being collected by Dartmouth College Museum during the first half of the nineteenth century in the interest of exploration and adventure.

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A pivotal moment in Dartmouth's early nineteenth century history coincided with the tenure of its president Bennett Tyler, a minister from South Britain, Connecticut. During Tyler's presidency (1822-28), Dartmouth students and faculty successfully petitioned the College to admit Edward Mitchell from Martinique, West Indies, in 1824. Though not without controversy, this event sparked Dartmouth's slow process of racial diversification beyond the few Native American students admitted under the college's original mission statement.

This beginning to Dartmouth's diversification of its student population foreshadowed the eventual diversification of its African collection, which began with President Tyler's son, Josiah. Following in his father's footsteps, Josiah Tyler entered the ministry and became a missionary to the American Board in Natal. While in South Africa, he collected forty-eight "Zulu" objects, most of which are still in the collection today, including a wooden headrest (Fig. 2) and a beaded snuff container (Fig. 3) which he donated to the Dartmouth College Museum in September, 1885 (Hunter 1968). Tyler's gift expanded the reach of the early African collection from the northern to the southern tip of the continent, opening the museum doors to objects from sub-Saharan Africa in accordance with the colonial scramble for African art and authority during the nineteenth century.

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Dartmouth's collections have a long history of combining science, art, and education, and like the College itself, the museum has gone through as many changes as the buildings that have housed it and the academic perspectives and curricular goals that have developed it. Until 1985, the collection was historically torn between the claims of various college departments and the desire for an independent museum; struggling with the growth of fledgling departments such as natural philosophy, natural sciences, sociology, anthropology, and fine arts; and residing in multiple museum manifestations, such as the Dartmouth College Museum; the Butterfield Museum of Paleontology, Archaeology, Ethnology, and Kindred Sciences; the Hopkins Center Art Galleries; and the Hood Museum of Art. The subsequent (re)classifications of the collections within these disciplines and museums, along with the long succession of inspectors, supervisors, and curators, inevitably led to works being transported to and from various locations around campus. At times, rooms or attics were temporarily dubbed "museum" while at other times the collections were housed in relevant academic buildings. In 1928, however, the museum collections were dispersed. The natural science collections were transferred to the diverse natural science disciplines for teaching purposes while the collections labeled "ethnographic" and "natural history" took up residence in Wilson Hall, home also to the anthropology department.

Despite the ever-increasing interest in sub-Saharan Africa, the fascination with ancient and contemporary Egypt continued to make its presence known at the Dartmouth College Museum through the acquisition of a sepulchral stela from Thebes, dated ca. 712-664 B.C. (Fig. 4) and a bequest of ninety-eight works collected in Egypt between 1866-67 from Emily Howe Hitchcock (1852-1912) of Hanover, New Hampshire. An interesting aspect of the Howe bequest, which had been largely missing from other acquisitions of Egyptian art, were examples of contemporary Egyptian art, including a blackened water jug from the mid-nineteenth century (Fig. 5).

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In 1939, Dartmouth College Museum acquired through gift and purchase from the Museum and Art Gallery of Reading, England, more than 350 objects. The acquisition was made up primarily of ancient Egyptian pottery dating from predynastic times to the Roman period and objects of everyday use from Uganda, a region that until that point had been unrepresented in the museum. Dartmouth College Museum was especially proud of the Ugandan acquisitions because Uganda was viewed at that time as "the gateway through which metallurgy, pottery cattle-raising, and other domestic arts were introduced to the 'dark continent'...." (5) Today the Ugandan materials are especially important because of their connection with the famous anthropologist Louis S. B. Leakey, whose work centered on early human origins in East Africa. Specifically, the Uganda materials that Dartmouth acquired from the Reading Museum were collected by Rev. R. H. Leakey, Louis Leakey's father, and Nellie Bazett, his aunt, of Reading, England, who traveled to Uganda in the late nineteenth century. Among the East African items acquired by the Dartmouth College Museum was a wooden stool (Fig. 6) collected in Bukede, Uganda; a beaded apron (Fig. 7) collected from the Kikuyu peoples of Kenya by Rev. Leakey; and an Islamic prayer board from Uganda.

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In the 1960s, Prof. James Fernandez of Dartmouth's anthropology department was instrumental in providing a new area of study in the African collections. While traveling to Dahomey, South Africa, Zambia, and Ghana during his tenure at Dartmouth College, he visited a number of local markets to buy objects for the museum. These objects, totaling 197, represented a broad range of items that were being made at that time for popular consumption. The wide diversity of these objects provides an interesting documentation of trade and cultural transformation in the visual arts immediately following the colonial period. Besides collecting objects of everyday use, Fernandez also purchased a strip of kente cloth in Togo from a man in exile from Ghana, a contemporary Fon applique cloth with symbols of Dahomean kings, and a contemporary Yoruba gelede mask (Fig. 8) purchased north of Puerto Novo, Benin (Dahomey), in 1966.

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From Ethnography to Art

In 1962, following the opening of the Hopkins Center Art Galleries in Dartmouth's new arts facility, many works that in earlier eras would have been given to the "ethnographic" collections were given as "art" to the galleries. Signaling its move away from curricular interests in natural history, the Dartmouth College Museum divested itself of its entire natural history collection in 1974 to help establish a regional museum, the Montshire Museum of Science, in the adjacent town of Norwich, Vermont. Moreover, Dartmouth merged the administration of its now extensive ethnographic, archaeological, and historical collections with its ever-expanding fine art collection, which had begun in 1793 as a small collection of portraits. (6)

Due to the changing attitudes toward the arts and the development of studio art programs at Dartmouth throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, the fine art collection now included not only a gift by Abby A. Rockefeller of one hundred paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures but also a gift from the Estate of Mary C. Rockefeller of an Egyptian black granite head of a god (Fig. 9) from the Late Period, 664-332 B.C., collected in Egypt by her husband Nelson A. Rockefeller (Class of 1930) in the early 1930s. Throughout the early 1970s, the collection was significantly augmented by a gift of forty-eight art works given to the Hopkins Center Art Galleries by Evelyn A. and William B. Jaffe Hall (Class of 1964H). These gifts included a Yoruba Shango staff (oshe Shango) (Fig. 10); a staff for Eshu (ogo Eshu Elegba) (Fig. 11), a Guro dance mask (zamble) (Fig. 12) in the style of the Zuenoula region of Bouafle; and a Shona buffalo figure headrest (Fig. 13), among other classic sculptural works mostly from West and Central Africa. Under the new auspices of the combined collections, these African works were finally categorized and promoted as "fine arts," with the collection making a noticeable shift from primarily nonfigurative arts to figurative sculpture.

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Despite the changing view of African sculpture as art rather than artifact during the mid-twentieth century, the unification of the two collection types did not yet completely break down the long-established divide. The development of the ethnographic collection still relied heavily on the support of the anthropology department. However, in 1976, Tamara Northern, a leading scholar in Cameroonian art and former curator of African collections at New York's Museum of Primitive Art, was appointed curator of ethnographic art and as an adjunct faculty member in the anthropology department. Northern brought a keen sense of aesthetics into the anthropological tendencies of the academic supporters of this particular collection, and in the interest of building up a larger presence of canonical works in the African art collection, she was instrumental in acquiring works of aesthetic and art-historical as well as anthropological value.

The transition to total integration was finally accomplished when the quest for a centralized museum structure was realized in 1985 with the opening of an independent museum, designed by Charles Moore, and renamed the Hood Museum of Art in honor of a distinguished graduate of Dartmouth College, Harvey P. Hood (Class of 1918). This centralization of its collections into a single facility represented one of the most significant steps in the history of the museum. With the completion of the new facility, the Hood Museum of Art was able to expand its original mission to serve as an important educational and cultural resource for the college and the rural New England communities. It was now able to provide Dartmouth College and museum visitors with more comprehensive and cohesive educational and outreach programs that incorporated all of its collections; provide exhibition spaces for works from all regions of the world; and develop a holistic approach to acquiring individual acquisitions of importance that relate to the museum's broader holdings and institutional goals.

For the ethnographic collection specifically, the move into the new structure meant it would be permanently unified with the fine arts collection, joining some of the museum's most important works, such as a set of six Assyrian reliefs from the northwest palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud (883-859 B.C.; S.856.3.1-7); (7) a 1769 pastel portrait by John Singleton Copley of Gov. John Wentworth (D.977.175); (8) The Epic of American Civilization, a mural by Jose Clemente Orozco (P.934.13); (9) and Pablo Picasso's Guitar on a Table (P.975.79). (10)

Refining the African Collection

For the ethnographic collection, (11) the move to the new, consolidated facility firmly rooted the works as an important component of the new art museum. By consolidating the art and ethnographic collections from various locations on campus, the museum could draw more effectively from its disparate collections for interdisciplinary use, further breaking down the barrier between art and artifact. Consequently, Tamara Northern's collection practices could focus more closely on the acquisition of objects with historical and aesthetic significance, emphasizing the quality of the object and the pursuit of so-called masterpieces, rather than on quantity or a broad range of representation as had been the case in the collection's earlier manifestations. From 1985 until her retirement in 1999, Northern intentionally developed the African collection with an eye on canonical works from West and Central Africa representing artistic production before the independence era.

Having guest curated at other colleges and institutions before her appointment at Dartmouth, Northern had established close connections with important collectors of ethnographic arts. Most important to the development of the Hood's collections were her ties with the Harry A. Franklin family. Franklin, who had begun collecting in 1938, opened his first gallery in Los Angeles in 1955 and was widely recognized as one of the earliest collectors to appreciate the aesthetic worth of non-Western art. Northern's friendship with Franklin's daughter, Valerie Franklin, who later directed her father's gallery, resulted in the family entrusting the Hood Museum of Art with their expansive collection of Melanesian art and part of Ms. Franklin's African art collection. Since 1990, the Harry A. Franklin Family Collection has contributed over eighty-six works of African art to the collection, including a Touba mask with a bird's beak (Fig. 14) and an Igbo ochichi bowl and lid (Fig. 15).

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Throughout the 1990s, the Hood Museum's new acquisitions in African art included both paradigmatic and noncanonical representations from Africa's major art-producing areas. Among the foundational pieces were Yoruba figures of Eshu-Elegba (Fig. 16), a Kongo nkisi figure (Fig. 17), and a male mask of authority (Fig. 18) from the western grassfields of Cameroon in the Babanki style. An Ngbe/Ekpe society power emblem (Fig. 19) from the Banyang peoples of Cameroon or the Ejagham peoples of Nigeria and a Yaka power vessel (Fig. 20) represent important elements of accumulative and noncanonical arts in Africa.

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Between 1984 and 1998, a new character was added to the African collection through gifts from Arnold and Joanne Syrop, well-known collectors of African brass art. The Syrop gifts of 190 brass castings of personal adornment made a significant contribution to the African collection, providing an almost encyclopedic study of West African brass adornment, including a very ornate Fulani armlet from northern Nigeria or Cameroon (Fig. 21) and a Manila-type anklet from the Djerma peoples of Niger. Other objects of historical significance that were added to the collection shortly before Northern's retirement from the Hood Museum of Art include a hip ornament representing the head of a Benin court official (Fig. 22), a Yombe memorial figure of a clan leader (mfumu kanda; Cover), and an African-Portuguese cross from an Old Portuguese church at Sao Salvador, former capital of the kingdom of the Kongo from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, now known as M'Banza Congo in Angola (Fig. 23). The museum's most recent acquisition of commemorative arts includes a Punu mukudj mask (Fig. 24) collected before 1927 by Lucien Claude-Lafontaine in Paris.

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The Hood Museum of Art Today

Since the opening of the new Hood Museum of Art facility in 1985, more than 350 art works from Africa have been added to its collections. (12) Both in preparation for the celebration of its twentieth anniversary in 2005 and in setting new goals for the future, the Hood Museum of Art has recently taken a new direction in its collection and exhibition goals, paying particular attention to works from underrepresented regions of Africa, especially figurative arts from East Africa. With this in mind, the collections now include a medicine container (nkhoba) with a carved figurative stopper (Fig. 25) and a standing figure of a male slave (Fig. 26) from the Shambaa or Zigua peoples of northeastern Tanzania, as well as an exquisitely carved Makonde staff (Fig. 27) from Mozambique.

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In keeping with its mobile and versatile past and working closely with the Hood Museum's curators and collections of American, European, and contemporary arts, the African collection has expanded its interests to modern and contemporary arts in recent years, developing a dialogue that blurs the boundaries of geography and time. This cross-regional dialogue enables art works from different regions of the world to inform each other and reflect the cultural interaction that more closely resembles actuality rather than historical paradigms. Serving the particular interests of Dartmouth's current curricula in anthropology, art history, studio arts, and history around discussions of cultural exchange and appropriation, examples from the African modernist movement have been added to its holdings. Some of these include art works from the early to late years of the Oshogbo school, including a drawing by Twins Seven Seven (Fig. 28), a tapestry by Fabunmi Adebisi, and a recent painting by Muraina Oyelami (Fig. 29). An adire quilt by the contemporary artist Nike Davies-Okundaye (Fig. 30) complements more traditional adire textiles (Fig. 31) collected by Adrian Wasler in and around Abeokuta, Nigeria, in 1977. Since 2002, the museum has also acquired works by African national and transnational artists working within the global art scene, such as Berni Searle (Fig. 32), Angele Etoundi Essamba (Fig. 33), Fazal Sheikh, Wangechi Mutu (Fig. 34), Yinka Shonibare, and Magdalene Odundo (Fig. 35), as well as the Malian photographer Malick Sidibe (Fig. 36), whose earlier work documented the modernization of Mali's youth.

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As with the other regional collections at the Hood Museum, the African collection strongly reflects the earlier history of the institution and the unification of two disparate collection modes focusing on the dichotomous notions of "art" and "artifact." What began almost 230 years ago as a cabinet of rare and intriguing curiosities containing fossils, stuffed animals, and other "souvenirs of important or strange events" (Bass 1985:10) is now one of the oldest and largest college museums in the country, housing more than 60,000 objects from around the world, including over 1,800 from the African continent. Despite its humble beginnings, its struggle for survival, (13) and the occasional setback, (14) the museum has continued to serve as an important educational resource for Dartmouth's faculty and students as well as for public audiences throughout northern New England. Since the opening of its new facility in 1985, the museum endeavors to open up the forum for less regionalized and ghettoized discussions about visual expression and to embrace a global perspective that does not privilege one form of expression over another or one region of the world over another. With its more balanced program of exhibitions, publications, and educational services, the Hood Museum of Art seeks to make a significant contribution to the understanding of the theory and history of the arts and their relation to the broader context of the culturally diverse world in which we live.

[This article was accepted for publication in September 2003.]

I would like to thank Risa Needleman, curatorial intern at the Hood Museum of Art from 2003 to 2004, ,and Deborah Haynes, data manager at the Hood Museum of Art, for their assistance with collecting data from the museum archives.

(1.) Quotes from the Charter of Dartmouth College, December 13, 1769. Dartmouth College was named after William Legge, the second earl of Dartmouth, an important supporter of Eleazor Wheelock's efforts to establish the college.

(2.) A mastodon molar and a portion of a tusk were among the objects sent by McClure to the budding museum, both of which exhibit all the traits of the famous paleontological site Big Bone Lick, in Boone County, northern Kentucky. These specimens were transferred in 1928 from the Butterfield Museum at Dartmouth to the geology department, with the molar being recovered by Dartmouth College Museum in 1957 and the tusk in 1958 (Bowen 1958:1).

(3.) It was not until 1810 that the museum collection was systematically recorded into official accession records. Hence, prior to 1810, records and documentation of museum acquisitions was negligible, if extant ;at all, making the dating of particular acquisitions difficult to determine.

(4.) Halt had become acquainted with the museum collection when he was appointed as Inspector of Dartmouth College Museum, a one-year postgraduate position, from 1804 to 1805.

(5.) This excerpt, based on a public relations text released by the museum at the time of the acquisition, was taken from the Hood Museum of Art object files, which includes a copy of "College Museum Has Notable Collection," from the Hanover Gazette, Thursday, November 9, 1939, p. 1.

(6.) Except for a brief period of reunion with the ethnographic collection from 1840 to 1870, the painting collection remained separate from the museum collection and fell under the aegis of Dartmouth College Library. In 1962, the portrait collection and other sections of the fine art collection were moved to the Hopkins Center Art Galleries, where they remained until their final move to the new facility of the Hood Museum of Art (Bass 1985:18).

(7.) The reliefs were acquired by the museum in 1856.

(8.) John Wentworth was governor of the Royal Province of New Hampshire and provided the land upon which Dartmouth would be built.

(9.) Orozco painted this famous mural in Baker Reserve Library from 1932 to 1934 while in residence at Dartmouth College.

(10.) In 1913, Picasso gave Guitar on a Table (1912) to Gertrude Stein. The painting was later acquired Nelson A. Rockefeller, who donated it to Dartmouth College.

(11.) The ethnographic collection made up about 54% of the College Museum's holdings in 1985, numbering about 20,000 objects, including about 1,300 examples from Africa.

(12.) Today, the museum's ethnographic collection comprises a little over half of the museum's holdings, with the African collection representing about 3% of the entire Hood Museum collection.

(13.) Between 1815 and 1820 the Dartmouth College Case--a bitter fight to remain a private college rather than become a state university--drained the College of its financial resources. During this time and in the ensuing years of recovery, the development of the museum collections took a direct hit, with its collections of art and artifacts shifting from one discipline to another in response to diverse teaching and display needs.

(14.) In 1798 a fire broke out in Dartmouth Hall, the location of the museum at that time, which damaged some of its contents. Then in 1811, some students protested the location of the museum in Dartmouth I tall by blowing down the walls of the museum with a canon, nearly wrecking the whole building (Bass 1985:13).

References cited

Bass, Jacquelynn. 1985. "A History of the Dartmouth College Museum Collections," in Treasures of the Hood Museum of Art. New York: Hudson Hills Press.

Bowen, W. Wedgewood. 1958. A Pioneer Museum in the Wilderness. Hanover, N.H.: The Dartmouth College Museum.

Hunter, John. 1968. Inventory of Ethnological Collections in Museums of the United States and Canada. 2d ed. Milwaukee: Milwaukee Public Museum.

Oliver, Andrew, Jr. 1979. Beyond the Shores of Tripoli: American Archaeology in the Eastern Mediterranean 1789-1879. Washington, D.C.: Washington Society of the Archaeological Institute of America.

Richardson, Leon Burr. 1932. History of Dartmouth College. 2 vols. Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Publications.