Where Gods and Mortals Meet: continuity and renewal in Urhobo art

African Arts, Winter, 2003 by Perkins Foss

This exhibition, curated by Perkins Foss, opens at the Museum for African Art, Long Island City, New York, on April 8 and runs through August 16. It assembles more than 80 works of Urhobo art together with photographs and video and audio recordings of cultural performances. As of this writing, "Where Gods and Mortals Meet" is scheduled to travel to the Columbia Museum of Art in Columbia, South Carolina, from October 16, 2004, to January 16, 2005. Arrangements for other venues are pending.

The accompanying catalogue (9" x 12 ", 192 pp., 110 color photos), edited by Foss and including essays by six contributors, is available for $65 in hardcover and $45 in softcover (subject to change). The book is published by the Museum for African Art and Snoeck, Ghent.

The exhibition and catalogue have been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts.

"Where Gods and Mortals Meet" and its accompanying catalogue constitute the first comprehensive presentation of the arts of the Urhobo, a southern Nigerian people who number about 1.5 million. (1) The Urhobo occupy the western fringe of the Niger River Delta, where a green rain forest belt descending from Benin City meets the alluvial plains of the delta proper, in an area encompassing some 5,000 square kilometers.

The works in the exhibition are organized into six sections that display and analyze the forms and underlying aesthetic values of Urhobo art and culture. These sections highlight the realm of personal images that offer protection and advancement, masquerade arts and accompanying song and dance, and, at the grandest level, communal shrine art, awesome in scale and form. They also provide an introduction to newer forms that are products of a culture in transition. In addition to the guest curator, both the exhibition and its catalogue have benefited from the scholarship and curatorial assistance of others, each a specialist in a particular aspect of Urhobo art. These include a world-renowned printmaker and sculptor, Bruce Onobrakpeya; a folklorist, G. G. Darah; a social scientist, Peter Ekeh; a poet and oral historian, Tanure Ojaide; a specialist in African religion, Michael Nabofa; and an art historian with expertise in both traditional and contemporary African culture, John Picton.

The title of one of the major chapters of the catalogue, "Beauty for the Gods," alludes to a key conceptual element of Urhobo aesthetics. Here, statues, staffs, and masks are not made to be pleasing to mortals; they are, rather, intended to attract, honor, and entertain the edjo, those powerful spirits of forest and stream who lie in the realm of erivwi, the world of the dead. According to Urhobo artistic convention, the gesture of an open mouth revealing rows of aggressive teeth is associated with a skull, especially the skull of a fish whose skin and flesh have been boiled off. This harsh image, fearsome and ugly to mortals, is seen as beautiful to the gods. (2) Its association with marine life reinforces the common expression "Edjo n'ame rhe," "The spirits come from the water." During an interview held in September 1972, Oviede Aramuemu Aki, a prominent artist from Evwreni, commented on this aesthetic attitude. He had carved for the water spirit Ohworhu a mask with a jutting jaw and sharp, bared teeth (Figs. 17, 18). When I asked him to compare it with the more naturalistic imagery of his neighbors to the north at the court of Benin, he replied, "Ah! They are making humans, but I am making edjo."

[FIGURES 17-18 OMITTED]

The subtitle of the exhibition, "Continuity and Renewal in Urhobo Art," highlights Onobrakpeya, who was born and raised in Urhoboland. His prints bring, as another scholar has noted, "a fresh lens through which to focus our understanding of Urhobo iconography." Each of the sections of the exhibition contains prints by Onobrakpeya--made in his unique plastograph technique--that provide contemporary thematic connections to Urhobo art from past generations (Fig. 16). A highly innovative printmaker who has been practicing his art for forty years, Onobrakpeya has turned to Urhobo themes for inspiration. His work offers a poignant perspective on modern African art as well as an innovative commentary on Urhobo culture and visual aesthetics.

[FIGURE 16 OMITTED]

Urhobo Origins

"We came from Benin" (Avware ihwo Aka). This commonly heard statement, when pursued by more detailed inquiry, usually reveals that although the Urhobo claim political allegiance to Benin, their origins are much more complex, and those of many village groups point not so much to the north as to the east and to the south--to the Igbo and to the Ijo. (3) Most Urhobo stories of migration and settlement share a theme of struggle, disagreement, and dispute. The historian Obaro Ikime notes that "a man and his immediate kith and kin might decide to found a new settlement in a search for greater farming and other opportunities, or as a result of some quarrel" (1969:15). Such tales of unrest--and the ultimate struggle to gain and hold land--seem to concur with the militaristic demeanor of much Urhobo shrine statuary. These images are, first and foremost, a family of invincible spirit-warriors, weapons at the ready, poised to protect. Their military gear--spear, cutlass, bands of leopard teeth--recalls in a general sense that worn by the soldiers who appear on Benin brass plaques. The actual manner of deployment, however, has been shifted into what can be termed a particularly Urhobo idiom.