African Art, African Voices: Long Steps Never Broke a Back

African Arts, Summer, 2005 by Allyson Purpura

African Art, African Voices Long Steps Never Broke a Back Philadelphia Museum of Art October 2, 2004-January 2, 2005

"African Art, African Voices: Long Steps Never Broke a Back" is a traveling exhibition created by curator Pamela McClusky at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM). The exhibition comprises more than 170 works selected predominantly from SAM's holdings, with the greatest share coming from the well-known Katherine White Collection. The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) was the exhibit's first of four venues (it also will travel to the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville). On view from October 2004 to January 2, 2005, the installation at the PMA was expanded considerably by John Zarobell, the exhibit's coordinating curator, who included more than thirty additional works of modern and contemporary art, most of which were selected from public and private collections in the New York and Washington, D.C., areas.

Though the exhibition's introductory panel described the show as a "survey of artistic achievements" from sub-Saharan Africa, "African Art, African Voices" was designed to be much more than that. The Seattle Art Museum's original initiative was to bring African experts and communities into the interpretive process, and to do so using more experimental exhibitry than the norm (Pamela McClusky, personal communication). The PMA installation thus highlighted the importance of African agency, expertise, and context in the display of African art. Indeed, the didactic core of the exhibition was an audio guide featuring the voices of ten experts or "cultural advisors," all but one of them African, whose lively annotations of the works on display--be it through personal anecdote, the interpretation of symbols and proverbs, storytelling, or lively formal analyses of figurative sculptures--provided visitors with a range of contextual information creating frameworks for looking at the artwork. Though varying in quality, the five videos distributed throughout the galleries helped to evoke a sense of place and conveyed well the living, performative dimensions of the works on display. The exhibit's focus on assisted looking--together with the fact that both tradition-based and modern/contemporary art was featured in the show--made it especially rich for thinking about representational practices in the display of African art.

The first thing visitors encountered as they entered the exhibit was a darkened room with a vitrined Benin bronze head, silhouetted against a lively video "mural" of contemporary street scenes from several cities across Africa. This was visually effective and coaxed a sense of connection between Africa's past and present, the regal and the everyday, which helped set a tone for the exhibit. From here visitors entered into the main exhibition space, predictably earth-toned in color, warmly lit at the entrance, and brightening as one passed through exhibit. Objects were vitrined or clustered--at times overly crowded, as with the gelede, Kom, and egungun displays--on rather inelegant platforms, while ndop and kente textiles were hung high on the walls. Visitors were strongly urged to use the audio guide, not only to experience the full effect of the exhibit, but also to access information about the objects that was lacking in the sparse and often vague text panels. All the modern and contemporary art--including photographs, mixed-media works, paintings, sculptures, an installation, and works on paper--was placed rather conspicuously in two "white cube" galleries at the end of the exhibition--a point I return to below.

I found it a bit odd that neither the introductory text panel nor the audio guide explained the meaning of the exhibition's subtitle, "Long Steps Never Broke a Back," or even mentioned that this was a Yoruba proverb, especially since its meaning was directly related to the curatorial goals of collaboration and contextualization and could have served to introduce them as such. This kind of transparency can convey to visitors that interpretation is never neutral and cannot be taken for granted--particularly where African art is concerned.

Like the exhibit's outstanding companion catalogue, artworks were grouped into roughly ten sections or "stories," beginning with "Heroes Go Solitary Walking," which featured three hunter's/warrior's shirts from the Katherine White Collection (Asante, Mande, and the wonderfully encrusted Maninka vest). Though these works were dramatically described on the audio guide, no text panel or advisor's biography accompanied them in the gallery. These were followed by "Collecting by and for Maasai Memories," which included beaded jewelry and belts, shields and spears, a headdress, game board, and assortment of leatherwork from the Kaputiei Maasai, as well as an interesting video showing members of the advisor's community selecting and donating works for the exhibit (an unusual story that left me wanting to know more). This was followed by "Sacred Medicines of the Kongo," which featured a cosmogram (drawn on the floor) and six Kongo figures, including an nkondi figure and my personal favorite, the delicately expressive "seated officer" (81.17.835). This was followed by "Assembling a Royal Stage: Art from the Kom Kingdom," where, despite the overcrowding of works on the platform, the elegant memorial figure of a queen mother (81.17.718) stood out. Next came a selection of works from Robert Farris Thompson's earlier book and exhibition project "African Art in Motion," among which I found the Osei Bonsu seated mother and child (81.17.323) and the Montol female figure (81.17.541) the most compelling. This was followed by "Art of Persuasion: Regalia from the Asante Kingdom," which included gold jewelry and gold weights, stools, kente cloth, and a film of the Asantehene's enstoolment procession, aptly described by advisor Koo Nimo Amponsah as a "museum in motion." Next, visitors came upon the intimidating basinjom "fault-finder," an impressive full-body costume with mask that was delightfully narrated (on the audio guide) by an initiate who, unfortunately, was never identified as Robert Farris Thompson. This was followed by groupings of Dan, gelede, and sowei masks. Among these, I was drawn to the gelede masks, particularly one attributed to Akapo of Igbesa (81.17.585) and those with delightfully jeering superstructures conveying their cautionary tales. These were followed by a cluster of Egungun masquerades, and directly above them, a wall-sized screen projecting films of seven different masquerade performances featuring mask types from the exhibit. In these last several sections, the narratives moved freely between terms that referred to ethnic groups, masquerade types, and initiation societies, which might have been confusing to a general audience.