African Arts — Global Conversations

How does a late nineteenth or early twentieth century Kuba mask from the Democratic Republic of the Congo relate to Gilbert Stuart's 1796 portrait of George Washington? What ensues when we place vessels from twentieth and twenty-first century ceramicists working in Seoul, Nairobi, and Lagos in dialogue? African Arts—Global Conversations endeavored to answer these innovative queries. The exhibition cultivated a deeper understanding of African art through a global lens. While contemporary African art tends to be curated with transnational histories in mind, there has been less focus on situating classical and modern African art within a global canon. Kristen Windmuller-Luna, at the time the Sills Family Consulting Curator, African Arts, at the Brooklyn Museum, placed key works from the longue durée of African art history in other departments—American, European, Asian, Ancient Egyptian—as part of a multifloor installation. Global Conversations is a title apropos to the dialogue encouraged by experimental thematic groupings, which avoided presenting a teleological and periodized history of art. The exhibition was transparent about its art historical inheritance and, accordingly, about the political and intellectual impetus behind the curatorial decisions. The first-floor gallery of the exhibition was a visual and textual introduction to important themes in an international context, such as modernism, feminism, and architecture. A Freetown, Sierra Leone Mask for the Ordehlay (mid-twentieth century) was on display beside an ancient Greek statue, Serapis (30 bce-395 ce), under the theme of transculturalism (Fig. 1). Ordehlay association masks contain iconographic influences from Chinese cinema, Yoruba masquerade, and the water spirit Mami Wata. Like the transcultural Ordehlay mask, Serapis was a god created by Egypt's Ptolemaic rulers for the purpose of Greeks and Egyptians worshipping the same deity together. On the topic of multiple modernities, a painting by Ghanaian artist Atta Kwami (b. 1956), Another Time, Yebubuyi (2011) (Fig. 2) was placed in dialogue with Study for Homage to the Square “High Tenor” (1959) by American artist Josef Albers (1888–1976). Eschewing a singular Euro-American narrative, this pairing illustrates how abstraction crafts multiple modernisms. In addition to a wide range of artworks, there were art history textbooks on display in a vitrine: a range from the 1930s to 1970s, including examples like Hendrik Willem van Loon and Grace Castagnetta's The Arts (1937) and H.W. Jansons History of Art (1970). These books, opened at distinct pages with highlighted paragraphs as archetypal examples, referenced the ways in which African art has historically been reduced to a primitivist footnote or referenced humbly as an inspiration to European modernists like Picasso. These difficult conversations and essential interventions must not be limited to curatorial practice in the museum, but rather, were made evident in art historical pedagogy writ large. The Eurocentric scope of the textbooks was remedied by the global conversations staged throughout the exhibition—initiated by Africanist interventions.In the Asian art gallery space, Untitled (1992), a white porcelain vessel from Korean artist Kang Suk Young (b. 1949), was accompanied in a vitrine by Symmetrical Reduced Black Narrow-Necked Tall Piece (1990) by Kenyan-British artist Magdalene Anyango N. Odundo OBE (b. 1950) and Antafi (2019) by British-Nigerian artist Ranti Bam (b. 1984) (Fig. 3). This curatorial grouping disrupted the notion of an authentic and insular Asian or African history of material culture. These contemporary ceramicists are each influenced by their personal cultural heritage, as well as slip-casting technique, Greek pottery, San Ildefonso Pueblo artists, and a diverse range of other technical aesthetic strategies. Another transcultural dialogue was present in the European wing through the placement of processional crosses from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries by Amhara artists in Ethiopia (Fig. 4). Although Christianity has been in Ethiopia since the fourth century, mainstream histories of Christian iconography often exclude Africa. Connections between Catholic Italy and Orthodox Ethiopia were staged through the installation of Amhara processional crosses with a fourteenth century processional cross by the Master of Monte del Lago in Italy. Another exhibition highlight was the juxtaposition of a Kongo power figure (nkisi nkondi) from the nineteenth century with the Egyptian Statue of Ity-Sen (2500–2350 bce), which was possibly excavated from the Tomb of Rawer in Giza. The works were thematically united through their disempowerment through iconoclastic acts—the head and feet removed from Ity-Sen and the magical medicine pack removed from the Kongo figure. This pairing also raised concerns about the historic separation of Ancient Egyptian objects from the rest of the African continent in museum collections—here, Egypt was reconnected to an African art history.Two interventions stood out in the art of the Americas: a Kuba mask within the line of sight of the infamous Washington portrait (1796) by Stuart (Fig. 5), and a Beauford Delaney (1901–1979) painting, Untitled (Fang Sculpture, Crow and Fruit) from 1945 grouped with a Fang reliquary guardian figure (ca. 1750–1860) by an Ntem River Valley Master in the Mvaï subgroup of the Fang ethnic group. The former grouping grappled with differing aesthetic approaches to the narrativization of origins: the personification of Wóót, the mythical ancestor of the Kuba, and the founding father myth of George Washington and the origins of the United States in the Stuart portrait. In the latter, Delaney's painting and the Fang reliquary figure highlighted the influential nature of African arts on the Harlem Renaissance. Accompanied by two books—The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925) by Alain Locke and Negerplastik (1915) by Carl Einstein—the pair raised difficult questions about the ways in which the primitivizing gaze of a text like Negerplastik mediated how Harlem Renaissance figures like Alain Locke and Beauford Delaney understood African art.For African art historians and curators in the twenty-first century, there has been an increased attention to globality in the lifeworlds of African artists, yet we still grapple with the most nuanced ways of putting African art in dialogue with other periodized art histories, especially in museum collections. The historic departments of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, although growing obsolete, have been a generalizing and primitivizing approach to resist. At the other end, we do not want to fall into the trap in which a “one tribe, one style” lens becomes the most dominant, as warned by Sydney Littlefield Kasfir (1984). The Department of African Arts at the Brooklyn Museum was formed very recently, in 2018, after many years of having been combined with art of the Pacific world. Windmuller-Luna succeeded at a balanced approach, in which African art objects can still be placed in dialogue with other Indigenous and non-African artists without the racist and colonialist primitivizing umbrella as a framework. The exhibition was celebrated through a “Virtual Art History Happy Hour” event on October 22, 2020. During the event, Lagos-based artist Taiye Idahor (b. 1984) discussed her ongoing Ivie Series. African American Studies and English assistant professor Nijah Cunningham, from Hunter College, spoke on the exhibition's ability to produce an image of global exchange. Joshua Cohen, assistant professor of art history at the City College of New York, presented on the implications of comparative frameworks in the exhibition.Overall, in African Arts—Global Conversations African art was placed in a series of philosophical and formal dialogues with works in other collections. This curatorial project pushed the field toward a global art history that refused hegemonic standards in which African art becomes important only through a Western ethnographic gaze. One may interpret this curatorial gesture as a pedagogical one, in which the inclusion of works from sub-Saharan Africa in other collections provides a critical learning opportunity for other collections

Art · Geography · The arts · Visual arts · African history and culture studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History

• One Tribe, One Style? Paradigms in the Historiography of African Art

  Open Access•Sidney Littlefield Kasfir•History in Africa•1984

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