A History Shaped by Futures Past

Art, Artists, and the Dialogic Turn at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art

Bibliographic Data

ID9023545
AuthorsKaren E Milbourne (Cleveland Museum of Art, corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume50
Issue4
Pages62-73
Publication date2017-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAfrican Arts (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0001-9933 • E-ISSN: 1937-2108
PublisherMIT Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1162/afar_a_00375
OpenAlexW2765957480
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited10

all photos by Franko Khoury, courtesy of the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian InstitutionThe year 2016 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the first work of art by an identified African artist to be accessioned into the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, an untitled study by Sudanese modernist Ibrahim El-Salahi (Fig. 1).1 Just two years after the museum was founded, the accessioning of El-Salahi's ink drawing suggests the diverse and inclusive representation of Africa's arts that would become characteristic of this institution. It also gives insight into the increased interest of the times in more accurate and in depth understanding of African creativity—as evidenced by the launching of this journal, African Arts, within just twelve months—and reveals the fierce intellectualism and creativity in the modernist experiments of El-Salahi and his contemporaries during this era of independence movements across the continent. In addition, the acquisition foreshadowed the future of a museum that would be both proactive in collecting works of art across time period, medium, and geography, and forward looking in its approach to exhibitions, programs, scholarship, and artist and audience engagement. Understanding the arrival of such works of art into the National Museum of African Art's collections and exhibitions allows us to understand and imagine not only the stories this museum has told, but has yet to tell. For as theorist Reinhart Koselleck reminds us (2004), we must understand “futures past” to understand historical time—and in the case of this essay, look to the past to understand the futures to come.On June 3, 1964, when Warren Robbins, a retired US Foreign Service Officer, opened the doors of the Museum of African Art, located in the home of former slave, abolitionist, and statesman Frederick Douglass, it was one year after he had founded the Center for Cross Cultural Communication of which it was to be a part, and the height of the Civil Rights movement. Robbins had returned from service in Germany and Austria—where he had been introduced to and fallen in love with African art—to an America in which Africa's arts and accomplishments were not being represented.2 Robbins imagined a different future, one in which the history of Frederick Douglass would be represented in the same building as a print by Wilfredo Lam, and information demonstrating the impact of Africa's arts on Picasso and other European modernists would be viewed alongside African art objects.3 He envisioned a building and a collection that would grow over time and contribute to the dynamic of change taking hold in America. The nature of the collection and its displays have evolved as the center Robbins created became part of the Smithsonian Institution in 1979 by an act of Congress, but its responsibility towards countering negative racial and geographic stereotypes and its endeavors to create meaningful engagements with African diversity and creativity has not.4 What has been underrecognized in this history, however, is the role of artists and the museum's collection practices in reimagining representations of Africa and African art moving forward.Ibrahim El Salahi's Untitled (1962) joined the museum's then small collection as the gift of Mr. and Mrs. Bjorn Ahlander of Washington, DC. Leslie Judd Ahlander was an art critic with a particular passion for Latin American arts who wrote for the Washington Post for thirteen years of her illustrious career. On April 14, 1963, Ahlander published in her regular column, “Art in Washington,” a review of multiple exhibitions—including a solo showing of works by Ibrahim El Salahi at the Middle East House. She wrote:At Middle East House, a young artist from Sudan, Ibrahim El Salahi is showing work of real interest ... His work is highly knowledgeable, sophisticated and clever. He uses line magnificently, combines images with the fertility of a surrealist, draws on African art and Islamic calligraphy with equal ease to create his personal idiom. The paintings recall Wilfredo Lam in their use of totemic fetish figures, but the color is rich and subtle, with dark shadowy areas from which looming figures emerge. Short descriptions of the subjects by the artist reveal his intimate point of departure. The image is transferred directly, without apparent rationalization of its subconscious meaning, but the technique is well controlled. There is nothing naïve here. Not all of the work is of equal interest; the artist is young enough to be eclectic and uneven. But in his mastery of line and telling image, Salahi is an artist of real value. (Ahlander 1963).It is likely, though not certain, that Ahlander collected the work from this exhibition—the artist's first in the United States. There are no records confirming this origin, and the artist remembers the drawing as a study, one among many he gave away but did not consider as material for an exhibition.5El Salahi recalls that the drawing was a “research work.”6 It dates to the time when the artist's international travels brought him in contact with such literary giants as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, and reveals his investigations of anatomy in order to understand the “bones,” or structures of calligraphy, as he was trying to create a new imagery—the visual language that would become associated with the Khartoum School and would characterize his future works. Upon seeing the sketch again more than fifty years later, he said,I wanted, when I was working with the human form, instead of having the muscles and the surface and so on, I wanted to get to the structure and have that give the rhythm. I [was] using a linear treatment, which gives almost a boundary and a void. I came to this point when I was working on calligraphy and trying to get to the meaning and move away from the meaning and to think of where it's going to take me to. That's why I had to break the for of the letter... when I did that, I felt like Pandora's box opening up. And shapes shifted which I had seen as animal, plant, as sound, as ghosts. This I found quite exciting. I used to work day and night like a madman. I never meant to keep it all. Most of it I gave away.Although not one of El Salahi's acclaimed oil paintings or formal ink drawings, as a study Untitled provides valuable insights into the artist's process during a formative period for Sudanese modern art. Its process-based, experimental nature also serves as a poetic metaphor for the nature of collecting itself, as curators search for the “bones” that will structure the new imagery of their subject moving forward. As indicated by the letter Warren M. Robbins wrote the Ahlanders to accept their gift, “this excellent work of art will make an important addition to our collection of contemporary African art.”7 Indeed it did. Today, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art houses the largest public collection of African modern and contemporary arts in the Americas, consisting of approximately 1,100 of its 12,000 works of art.8Pierre Bourdieu has argued that the perception of the art world extends beyond the relationship of the object to its aesthetics to include concepts of value, classification, and sociopolitical influence. He describes a field of cultural production with a “shared language” in whichthe “subject” of the production of the art-work—of its value but also of its meaning—is not the producer who actually creates the object in its materiality, but rather the entire set of agents engaged in the field. Among these are the producers of the works, classified as artists (great or minor, famous or unknown), critics of all persuasions (who are themselves established in the field), collectors, middlemen, curators, etc., in short, all those who have ties with the art, who live for the art and, to varying degrees, from it, and who confront each other in struggles where the imposition of not only a world view but also a vision of the art world is at stake, and who through these struggles, participate in the production of the value of the artist and of art (1993:261).Museums can, and do, shape “the production of the art-work,” offering multiple interpretations and presentations of singular objects and building a collective view when objects are joined together in a collection. Through their selection of artworks and voices, art museums shape the language—and vision—by which a subject (or region), like Africa (when arts from Sudan to South Africa are united) might be shared. Geographically designated museums, like the Smithsonian NMAfA, collect or exhibit works of art that institutionalize visions of the complex cultural, spatial, political, racial, and temporal constructs associated with Africa, as well as its artists. Even though Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen have so shrewdly noted that continents are a “myth” because, “when it comes to mapping global patterns, whether physical or human phenomena, continents are most often simply irrelevant” (1997:33), artists, collectors, curators, directors, governments, and others continue to invoke concepts of Africa. And, for better or worse, institutions promote or undermine existing gendered, racial, ethnic, class, and generational power differentials through the “shared language” they promote via their interactions with works of art. NMAfA's vision has changed over the decades, and this evolution points to new directions for its future “shared language.”Throughout its first ten years, the Museum of African Art continued to acquire modernist and contemporary art by African American artists as well as African, both named and not—as was sometimes the case with “Makonde” wood carvings. The vision was more closely attuned to the principles of black pride than a continent-focused narrative. Its exhibitions also reveal how even the shared language of these earliest days included attention to modern art and named artists. 1968 marked the opening of “Ethiopian Paintings”; a Ladi Kwali exhibition entitled “Contemporary Nigerian Pottery” appeared in 1972; it was followed by “The Nigerian Sculpture of Lamidi Fakeye” in 1973; “Contemporary African Art (The Wolford Collection)” in 1974; and “Contemporary Senegalese Tapestries” in 1978—the opening of which Leopold Senghor attended.9 It was not until the later 1970s, as the museum transitioned to the Smithsonian, that it narrowed its collections policy from welcoming global artists whose work revealed the influence of Africa's arts in European and American modernism—with limited attention to the black arts movements of the day—to a focus on artists linked geographically to the African continent.Throughout 1979, the year the museum was integrated into the Smithsonian, Warren Robbins and his team continued to accept gifts of contemporary art, including twenty-three enamel on fiberboard paintings by Tanzanian artist Tinga Tinga and other artists working in his style, and a vibrantly haunting canvas by Malangatana of Mozambique joined the collection in 1980 (Fig. 2). Until the arrival of Sylvia Williams as director in 1983 and Philip Ravenhill as chief curator in 1987, however, works of modern and contemporary art came in exclusively as gifts and thus it was largely chance or opportunity that determined what was accessioned. Nevertheless, it is clear that is that these gifts were accepted as part of concerted efforts to represent the diversity of expression from across the African continent. It was in 1990 that the museum purchased its first work of modernist art, a print entitled Dancing Masquerade (1979) by Tayo Tekovi Quaye (Fig. 3) and began to invest money in shaping the shared language of its future—a task that remains challenging in the face of budget constraints. The following year, twenty-five years after the accession of Ibrahim El Salahi's ink study, the museum acquired its first work by an internationally recognized woman artist, with the elegant Reduced Angled Spouted Black Piece by Magdalene Odundo (Fig. 4), marking the beginning of more strategic acquisitions that would allow for a shared language more sensitive to the nuances gained through collections that are inclusive in relation to gender, media, and nationality.10By the time Elizabeth Harney was hired in 1999 as the first curator dedicated to Africa's contemporary arts, the collection already consisted of nearly 300 works on paper, paintings, sculptures, and time-based media by artists of diverse training and racial and economic backgrounds. The works she encountered had come in through the passion with which Warren Robbins cultivated donors, as well as through the taste of his successor, Sylvia Williams, and chief curator Philip Ravenhill. For instance, Williams had so fallen in love with the prints of Mohammad Omer Khalil that she bought twelve for the museum and corresponded directly with the artist. Ravenhill's discerning eye brought in six of William Kentridge's Drawings for Projection, along with two of the drawings used in their creation (Fig. 5).11 And exhibitions like Simon Ottenberg's “The Poetics of Line: Seven Artists of the Nsukka Group” ushered in strengths in schools like the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. It was not until Harney's tenure with the museum, however, that its first collections strategy document for modern and contemporary art was drafted. In it, she pointed to the need to develop cohesive representation of major university programs and movements.12The arrival of the new millennium at NMAfA brought with it a re-entrenching of classification systems within the museum, dividing what gets called “traditional” arts from ideas of the “modern” and “contemporary” in ways that are likely to be questioned as we move toward the future. For instance, photography is a medium often associated with the contemporary and yet it has flourished on the continent since 1839, the year the daguerreotype and calotype were invented.13 As António Ribeiro has so pithily noted, “Jacques Daguerre's discovery took just eleven weeks—the length of the voyage—to reach South Africa” (2006:133), which would make the earliest photographic images on the continent a good deal older than much of what gets labeled “traditional.” Indeed, masquerades are among the most “contemporary” performance arts flourishing on parts of the continent to this day, including in urban areas such as the city of Calabar in Nigeria (Fenton 2010:39). Thus, it might make more sense to discuss the diverse creative practices of Africa with attention to the time and space in which they are created, rather than the misleadingly temporalizing classification systems by which they have been framed. What gets called “the traditional” did not necessarily precede “the contemporary” in Africa; they have operated side by side, and though this sound, all Africa's arts have been contemporary at the time that they were NMAfA's collections this in with 2016 seeing the museum two for the years have seen efforts to and within the collection that the museum's future to and Africa's arts across time geography, and As a the museum has a photography and become home to works by (Fig. and among In addition, in of a to the representation of artists across media, the museum has and acquired work by both formative modernist artists and artists working and at the to the collection (Fig. and will be joined by to of South African and her (Fig. became the first oil by a woman artist to the collection (Fig. followed by a canvas by modernist (Fig. the museum's first acquisition of created by Nigerian in to the exhibition as and in the of Africa” (Fig. efforts reveal the of collections in that might be of the to that of by Reinhart the language to be shared moving forward. also point to the new in museum as artists become his at the 2016 African in Washington, more than a from the by a of at all the taking across the of African African art history, has most the in her poetic on within the field in relation to concepts of and not an has also the of the in relation to As he a of into an it also created a space for ways of with often within a more He on to artists and curators as cultural agents of whose to a set of and for their But is more to it than As has by not in but are to what came and what is to The to which is in nature and by the creative of artists in with curators as the artists and curators as or of artworks As the National Museum of African Art toward the future, its on with and artists. The interpretations and we are more and with artists than the NMAfA its Artists in in which two artists are to create new works of art in a and with one to the of the creative process (Fig. The was to the from production and to the that Africa's artists, like artists are diverse engaged in global this in an of to that by in relation to that draws into a with all and the museum to the opening of the exhibitions and of the artists in their artists in public the museum created its first and an was in the to allow the public to of museum and artists in addition to the artworks in the and the more print to the such is part of what as would it also the of museums, in as we move into the fifty It is also important to that such with artists have its the of sensitive that it important to whose to the work of art and For the exhibition and linked the as a material that has been and of were the works of art were that had been created the selection process so that the exhibition brought together that had already been rather than to a In the by which the objects were from with artists, like and as to important subjects to the museum's however, El and to to the of the exhibition and create new which these to be in ways not imagined by the museum or Smithsonian (Fig. of artists to and museum is not but it is much a part of the future. For NMAfA, artists have been to create new works of art all the museum's a opening in the all of these are to become of for artists and new of for much of this has on the it is we to the future with what we have from the Warren Robbins had not seen the in the gift of a and ink study by a young artist, the museum would not have the to to strengths in the arts of the Khartoum in and contemporary African art, in As the collection and new artists, and come in contact with it, the who make the to new The allows museum curators to and the with to understand what the artists are they are a beyond or a review of what artists might have been in the like NMAfA, work with artists from the time an accession is the artist and understanding and for the Museum also and make new works, as be seen most at NMAfA with art concepts are and in with with artists and other Artists like on the NMAfA's and as the museum for a new an artist on the selection For the past ten years, NMAfA has artists like with their as they develop future as part of the Smithsonian And in NMAfA its African Art in which two artists will be each year for their and as well as the in allow museums to create and in with artists and As a our shared language we move the will in museums like NMAfA inclusive for artists and in all their NMAfA is working on to the of in Africa's arts and to create in which artists and other of change alongside artists like and our future will be with and a of image, and

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