Deep Ties

Doran and I interviewed one another in spring, 1972, when I was recovering from appendicitis in a hospital bed; after a half hour of talk, I hoped he would choose UCSB for his graduate work. He did. Although he started while I was in Ghana in 1972–73, he took my Fall ‘73 course on African arts and wrote an excellent if wordy term paper to which I assigned an A-minus—for him a low grade he never ceased kidding me about, because I wrote extensive comments that he often later claimed, in hyperbole, were longer than the paper itself. He loved embellishing that story, the last version of which he told a few days before he joined the ancestral realm. I then kidded him back, that I was sorry it was not a B+. He was bright, eager, confident, and friendly that fall yet frustrated that I was not there when he had arrived a year earlier, in part because he didn't appreciate my sabbatical replacement. We sparred a bit but got along well, and he dove into my seminar on the arts in Ghana, his first foray into Fante artworks. I happened to have a bumper crop of grad students that year and all seven went to Ghana with me the next summer, 1974. Doran had earlier spoken briefly about moving to a graduate program elsewhere, but he stayed, hooked on Ghana.People who read this, those who ever managed to negotiate a full dozen steps in his unsurpassed curiosity cabinet of a Brentwood apartment/library/research center/art gallery/storage unit (Fig. 1), might be surprised to learn that on our way to Ghana Doran claimed he would not try to collect any art, that collecting did not interest him; he felt research and scholarship shouldn't mix with collecting. On the ground in Ghana he changed his mind after a week, or maybe two.In his second year at UCSB Doran wrote a thorough MA study of Akan forowa, the hammered brass pomade containers that, like most Akan forms, illustrate many patterns with associated proverbs. This began Doran's comprehensive archiving of motifs and hundreds of other abstract and representational motifs linked with sayings, such as those featured on adinkra stamps and counselors’ staffs.Doran's Fante research that summer began our lively, deep collaboration that resulted in the 1977 The Arts of Ghana exhibition and book, partly thanks to the UCLA Museum of Cultural History's assistant director, the late George Ellis, who took a chance on an improbable project attempting to survey all the arts of a nation of 20 to 25 million people. Rash indeed.1 That early venture, with his vital contributions, began, then sealed Doran's long and rich relationship with Ghanaian arts, from figural sculpture to architecture (Fig. 2) and Asante regalia, including many cast gold and gold-leafed forms and kente cloth, and on to all the Fante military arts—flags, uniforms, war shirts, posuban shrines, and festivals—to the prolific Kumasi sign painter Kwame Akoto, known as Almighty God.Doran's rigorous, detailed, fine-grained surveys of virtually all Akan art forms reveal him to have been a quintessential “splitter,” if one believes, as I do, that the human race is divided between “lumpers” and “splitters.” Our work together prospered, I think, as I was then the “lumper,” looking for big picture ideas, generalizations applicable across classes of data, while Doran sought the endless fine differences among forms in varied categories or series. For example, I coined the phrase, “the verbal-visual nexus of Akan arts,” whereas Doran catalogued as many proverbs and other sayings as possible, matched with their visual motifs, part of his unparalleled archive now at the Getty Research Institute. In his several books on Asante, Fante, and other Akan arts, of course, Doran became an adroit, persuasive lumper as well, and at the same time, an excellent writer. After he started working at what became the Fowler, he decided against pursuing his PhD. Clearly, he didn't need one, although tacitly, he earned two or three.Doran started and finished his Ghanaian field work among the coastal Fante on more than twenty shorter and longer trips over about forty years, interspersed with weeks and months among Asante and other Akan and Ewe peoples. Beginning in 1974, he visited virtually all Fante communities with asafo companies in his quest to record all existing art forms, starting with posuban, those marvelously hybrid structures that were shrines, storage houses, and gathering points—and often wonderfully bravado sculptural and architectural beacons boasting a company's military power (Fig. 3). That summer I was overseeing the research of all seven students in various places, but nearly half my time was spent with Doran. Together we attended several Fante Akwambo, annual “path-clearing” festivals where both individual small flags, commissioned by asafo captains, and huge 200+-foot-long flags were displayed. One such festival took place on the day Ghanaian motor traffic shifted from left lane to right lane driving, understandably causing crazed chaos on the roads; we survived. Our second Ghana summer, 1975, we spent mostly together. Thanks to the late UCLA professor Kwabena Nketia, we gained access to several Asante kings, who generously had all their regalia brought out into palace courtyards so we could photograph and take notes; obviously, these were treasure troves for the Ghana arts project and for Doran's later books and articles on gold and cloth (Fig. 4). He extended these royal visits later to include all Asante (and many Fante) kings. His field work methods—questioning, photographing, note-taking— were always thorough and meticulous. In our third summer, 1976, this research continued with trips to the far North, and Doran interviewed the great Asante sculptor Osei Bonsu, whose prolific career he documented in detail. His careful, attentive interviewing was terrific to observe, a model for me and others. Doran was also a superb photographer. In later years, I urged Doran to issue a revised edition2 of The Arts of Ghana, under the names Ross and Cole, but for unclear reasons, that never happened.Friendships are not easy to describe, but good ones, like ours, are surely a kind of love. In many months of traveling together in Ghana, strategizing fieldwork for The Arts of Ghana project, dividing up sections of the book, writing sort-of-together and reading/editing each other's work, the student-teacher relationship dissolved quickly and completely. We shared flat tires, bad roads, and warm beer in northern Ghana (Fig. 5), and many fine times, such as the triumphs of meeting Mamprussi (Fig. 6) or Asante kings who opened their rich treasuries for us. There were countless meals, some drinks, and endless conversations into the night. Not seeing one another for weeks, or later, months, we'd take up where we left off, not missing a beat. I spent the entire summer of 1984 at his apartment, working with him on the soon-to-open Igbo Arts: Community & Cosmos exhibition, for which he was my sensitive boss as associate director of the Fowler. In more recent times, his marvelous partner Betsy Quick often shared our get-togethers, always fun and entertaining. Doran was as close a friend as I've ever had: generous, funny, candid, interesting, deep, outgoing, smart, thoughtful, exacting, complex, thorough, sharp-eyed, occasionally confounding or quirky, yet always fully present for me, and for the many others who learned from and enjoyed his remarkable friendship

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