Doran Ross, Our Mentor and Friend

I met Doran Ross during my first year of graduate school. I had been enrolled in a graduate class that researched and wrote chapters for the publication that accompanied the exhibition The Eloquent Dead: Ancestral Sculpture of Indonesia and Southeast Asia (1985). I do not know why I, of all the students in the class, was the one asked to work on the exhibition for what was then the Museum of Cultural History in the basement of Haines Hall. I do remember walking into Doran's office and being confronted with a large quiet man— at least that was my initial impression. He was definitely big but I was to find that he was not always quiet. He did not say much to me in that first meeting other than to explain what he wanted me to do and to escort me out the back door of his office into the hall, arms full of papers and books, with no idea where to go because he had forgotten to assign me a workspace. This began over a decade of working with and for Doran Ross in many different roles at the Fowler Museum and at the offices of African Arts. What I did not realize when I walked into his office that day was that I had met the person to whom I would owe my career.Doran Ross's generosity of spirit in mentoring scholars at every level has, over the last thirty years, shaped the field of African art. Over time I watched as Doran encouraged everyone from established greats to graduate students fumbling their way into the field and provided them all a place to develop, publish, and exhibit their research, even when, as a result, he had to put his own work on the back burner. Even then, he was advising graduate students and sharing his own network in Ghana with them. He advised Scott Edmondson, for example, to contact Kwame Akoto of Almighty God Art Works, with whom Doran had been working for decades. He also mentored Courtnay Micots as she prepared for fieldwork in Ghana, which was the beginning of a lifelong friendship of phone calls and professional advice.I think it was to Doran's great disappointment and amusement that I was not interested in becoming a specialist in the arts of Ghana, as my heart had already been claimed by the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We had many an animated conversation about who had superior art: the Kuba or the Akan. Even so, Doran began training me for a museum career. Through the years, he moved me around the departments at the Fowler so that when I got that first professional museum job, I had an understanding of how a museum functioned from the inside. He discovered that I had some computer experience and assigned me to African Arts to assist in their transfer of subscription records onto the computer database. When I asked him to read my master's thesis on the Sala Mpasu, he had me rework it for publication in African Arts (Cameron 1988), even offering to provide photographs of the Sala Mpasu masks in the Fowler's collection to illustrate the article.I had the opportunity to work behind the scenes on almost all the amazing African exhibitions at the Fowler in the 1980s and early 1990s, looking over Doran's shoulder with a clipboard in hand. I organized exhibition planning sessions and took care of the logistics of bringing major figures in the field to the Fowler. Although many of the giants who were guest curating the exhibitions probably only saw me as the person who got their tickets and booked their hotels, Doran made sure I met them and always included me in meals and private events, thus encouraging me to establish myself as a scholar and not just as his assistant.One day, as I was close to filing my dissertation, Doran called me into his office and handed me a folder of photographs of African dolls. He asked me how I would curate an exhibition of this collection. I thought back to a graduate seminar I had taken with Herbert Cole at the University of California, Santa Barbara on play and performance theory and mumbled something incoherent about framing them in play theory. He told me to take the folder home and bring him an exhibition prospectus the next day. Although I got no sleep that night, I managed to present something coherent and became the curator of my first exhibition, Isn't S/He a Doll: Play and Ritual in African Sculpture (1995) (Fig. 1). He continued to be instrumental in every professional move I made, from recommending me to LACMA as curator for their exhibition Music for the Eyes: The Fine Art of African Musical Instruments in the citywide celebration The Heritage of African Music (1999), and smoothing the way for my move to be curator at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.Doran's influence on curators of African art was not limited to me. Through the amazingly rich range of exhibitions of African art created by the Fowler that traveled throughout the United States and Europe, Doran's influence became part of the DNA of exhibiting African art. Christa Clarke considers the time she spent with him in Ghana working on an exhibition as a treasured memory (Fig. 2). I am jealous of Christa's experience and that of all who traveled with Doran as I was never able to visit Ghana with him or show him the wonders of the Congo.I think I only disappointed Doran once during our long association, and that was the day I called him to tell him that I was leaving the museum field to become a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His only comment—and the greatest compliment he ever gave me—was that it would be a great loss to the museum world. Even though he had hoped I would remain in the museum field, he continued to be a major supporter and friend as I took the same role as those guest curators I had been in awe of in graduate school and curated Art of the Lega (2001–2002) (Fig. 3).The last time I talked to Doran was a few months before his death. We talked occasionally, usually when one of us had a particular question. This time he had called just to tell me how much I had meant to him. I am grateful that I was able to tell him that I owed my career to him and to thank him for everything he had done for me. He had called to say goodbye and I knew the field of African art would never be the same

Sociology · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation · Historical and Architectural Studies · Psychology

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