Roy Sieber: master before the changeless mirror 1923-2001 - in memoriam - Obituary

African Arts, Winter, 2001 by Robert Farris Thompson

Roy Sieber is forever: expert eye, copious beard, reassuring arm around a worried graduate student, uncopiable mix of fellowship and authority. More than four hundred persons attended Roy's funeral in Bloomington last October. That means four hundred impressions of the man who put African art on the map in America.

Roy Sieber is the master of the material surround. He loved objects. He mastered their meanings and contexts. His eye was in harmony with his hand when he wrote, restoring to objects the life-giving essences of their time, place, and maker. He shared this passion and changed many lives.

Anita Glaze remembers the night Roy and Sophie invited her home for dinner: "... and when I went inside! There was Coptic art, stained glass, American antiques, Persian rugs, African sculpture and textiles and furniture." She went out with Roy and bought her first rug, a small Kazak, and then an antique. Roy showed her how to strip the antique down to its original layers and work it back up to perfection. Hidden in his gesture was a symbol of ideal scholarship.

In the process of becoming a world-class expert, Roy never forgot how to be generous. Both Glaze and Christopher Roy tragically lost parents, and Roy became a surrogate father to them. Not without reason would Rosalind Walker and Glaze affectionately refer to him as Papa Sieber. As Glaze recalls, "It was personal warmth plus professional discipline. He inspired you without being threatening."

Collectors admired him. But this did not deter Roy from pointing out the limitations of the tropism toward "patina, provenance, and purity." Social scientists loved him too, and considered him one of them on account of his fieldwork and rigor. Roy put history back into African visual studies, making documents move for the objects, and objects move for the documents, recovering the meanings hidden in time.

He was always ready to share what he knew, and what he knew was prodigious. I remember an encounter in the fall of 1967. I was preparing "African and Afro-American Art: The Transatlantic Tradition," my first exhibition, for Robert Goldwater and Douglas Newton. I had just collected in tidewater Georgia a small problem piece: a polished, dark-brown wooden spoon with the handle transformed into a short standing figure.

Two writers had already defined the piece as an African "survival" in the city of Savannah. I did not like the term survival. It made things sound isolated, static, and doomed. Plus there was no evidence as to provenance and maker other than that the spoon had turned up in a city with blacks. Nevertheless, I knew that if there was a trace of African influence in this object, Roy Sieber would be the best person to detect it. So I borrowed the spoon and I took it to Roy in the Hilton Hotel in New York. He gave it one look and said: "It's Ifugao." It was a rice spoon from northern Luzon in the Philippines. That was that. One less piece to write up. But it wasn't until that moment that I realized Sieber was as wise in Oceanic art as he was in African.

Roy and I were roommates in Dakar at the 1966 World Festival of Black Arts. Katherine Dunham, the choreographer, had asked me to give a small lecture on the history of New York mambo illustrated with a film. For some strange reason I felt that looking at frames, holding the reel up to the light in the bathroom, would better prepare me for the lecture the next morning. Roy burst into the bathroom at 3 a.m. to see what the hell was going on. He took in the film, spread like a celluloid serpent all over the tile floor, rolled his eyes, and went back to bed. We've been friends ever since.

Roy lives in his books. I keep coming back to them. First is Sculpture of Northern Nigeria (1961). It started a Sieber tradition: don't just write a catalogue--open up a new field while you're at it. I love that catalogue. I grew up on it. I love the map, black, sleek, and glowing, with place names and rivers in white, like marks cut on smoked glass. The beauty of the map and the beauty of the design were statements in themselves. This catalogue would inspire, very shortly, Arnold Rubin to work in this area and push the frontier out even farther.

There are perceptual gems in this book. Here is one of them: "The artist was conservative and committed to traditional modes. Yet from the evidence of the objects this was not an overwhelmingly restrictive deterrent" (p. 5). Here was a seed of the conference called "Individual Creativity and Tribal Norms" that was held four years later at UCLA, where Roy took on a Mesoamericanist for assuming that Aztec was higher that African. Show me some iron, said Sieber.

Sculpture of Northern Nigeria included women. Roy brought to our attention Azume, the superb Goemai potter. Wet clay in her hands turned into something appreciable--well-weighted coiffure, wide lidded eyes that surge with the spirit, and cicatrized signs of affiliation and well-being. Her genius was unique, and Roy reported the challenge: "[She] may be an instance of an unusual capability which survives only for the lifetime of the artists, is not transmitted as a craft and does not become part of the repertory of the tribe" (p. 12).