Cloth is Money

After a hiatus from museums during the pandemic, I was grateful for the opportunity to return to the galleries with a visit to the Fitchburg Art Museum (FAM) for the exhibition Cloth is Money: Textiles from the Sahel. Entering the museum's atrium, I was greeted by an expansive Fulani arkilla jenngo spread across the wall of a nearby alcove (Fig. 1). With its dynamic checkered design and bold contrasting colors, the striking ceremonial tent hanging offered a tantalizing hint to the lush array of textiles to come later in the main gallery space. Drawn entirely from the museum's extensive holdings of African art, Cloth is Money featured ten works of twentieth and twenty-first century textiles from the Sahel, a region that comprises the geographic transition zone between North and sub-Saharan Africa. Placed within a hallway gallery connecting the building's two wings, the exhibition was curated by Jean Borgatti, consulting curator of African, Oceanic, and Native American art.All but one of the ten textiles in Cloth is Money were once in the collection of Dr. John P. Hutchison, Emeritus Associate Professor of African Languages & Linguistics at Boston University, who has spent much of his academic career traveling, researching, and forging relationships in the Sahel. As a young Peace Corps Volunteer in the 1960s, Hutchison discovered his gift for learning languages and later conducted doctoral research on the Kanuri language. Over his years of work and travel across West Africa, primarily Niger, Hutchison accumulated a rich collection of textiles, some of which were acquired by FAM. For this reason, Borgatti described the exhibition as an opportunity to honor Hutchison as a donor and collector, and reflect on the provenance of the objects from the linguist's voyages across the Sahel.Borgatti developed the exhibition with Sahelian history in mind. “What I have found particularly exciting about this exhibition is that it allowed me to talk about West Africa between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries,” she explained. “Although the textiles date from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, they reflect the same techniques, designs, and range of colors evident in archaeologically recovered textiles from the caves on the Bandiagara escarpment [in Mali] that date to the time period that roughly overlaps with the European Middle Ages.”1 The exhibition's introductory wall label succinctly outlined the history of trans-Saharan trade that facilitated the development of the first West African trading empires, Ghana (300-1200 ce), Mali (1230-1600 ce), and Songhai (1230-1600 ce). Cloth is Money came on the heels of two groundbreaking exhibitions focused on art, exchange, and empire in the Sahel: the Block Museum's Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa and the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shore of the Sahara. As the first major exhibitions encompassing the scope of trans-Saharan trade and the legacy of medieval African trading empires, Caravans of Gold and Sahel attested to the growing interest in this region and history in the field of African art history.Focusing the timeline on the past century, the Fitchburg exhibition cleverly worked within the strengths of its permanent collection to engage with this medieval African narrative and further the work foregrounded by the larger exhibitions. The ten textiles included in Cloth is Money spanned the countries in and bordering the Sahel with examples from Tunisia, Libya, Mali, and Niger. Ranging from wool to cotton and from indigo to earth, the media showcased the breadth of fiber and dyeing materials used to produce the wide assortment of textiles in the region. For visitors unfamiliar with weaving techniques, the exhibition also included a helpful supplementary display that outlined weaving mechanics and presented weaving implements, including a shuttle, spindle, and rolled woven strip (Fig. 2). Borgatti's efforts to contextualize the woven works expanded to the individual textiles which were each accompanied by an extended label and many by photographs illustrating how the textile was fabricated or employed in its original context. For example, photographs of Malian women meticulously hand-painting designs accompanied the exhibition's bògòlanfini wrapper (Fig. 3). Notably, these labels and captions were presented in both English and Spanish, an aspect that Borgatti highlighted as crucial given Fitchburg's ever-growing Spanish-speaking community. Both these efforts to make the material and text of the exhibition accessible demonstrated the museum's commitment to inclusivity and education in serving its public.By emphasizing the connections between the centuries-old origins of the contemporary textiles presented, Cloth is Money highlighted a chapter of African history not typically presented to the general public. In addition to the supplementary display of weaving technologies, the exhibition provided background information on the Bandiagara escarpment, where fragments of strip-woven textiles dating between the eleventh and fifteenth century were found. Photographs depicted these fragments and text identified the methods, motifs, and materials that persisted centuries later in the twentieth and twenty-first century examples displayed just across the hallway (Fig. 4). In this way, the exhibition afforded its public an opportunity to consider the distant past via present textile practices that attest to the continued cultural significance of woven cloth in the Sahel.While Cloth is Money was constrained by the limited space of its narrow gallery, the exhibit's position in this transitional space functioned thematically to underscore its link with historical trans-Saharan trade routes (Fig. 5). In the same way that such networks of exchange connected disparate regions across the Sahel during the time of the great African kingdoms, so too did this exhibition form a contact zone with the museum's larger exhibition of African art. Borgatti noted this, saying, “[Cloth is Money] works well with our long term exhibit into which it leads since that exhibition, Moving Objects, is about provenance—or how works of art make their journeys from their points of origin to their places in museums, and the hands they pass through on the way.”2 This emphasis on the cultural biography of and physical paths taken by the objects was clearly articulated in the exhibition's concept, text, and installation. As art institutions increasingly grapple with issues of provenance concerning African art, FAM's head-on approach to acknowledging the objects’ paths to the museum comprised an admirable contribution to an expansive discourse within a small yet effective exhibition

Art · Economics · African history and culture studies