Cloth Only Wears to Shreds: Yoruba Textiles and Photographs from the Ulli Beier Collection

African Arts, Winter, 2004 by Lisa Aronson

Cloth Only Wears to Shreds Yoruba Textiles and Photographs from the Ulli Beier Collection Rowland Abiodun, Ulli Beier, and John Pemberton Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Amherst, MA; 2004; 128 pp., 23 b/w and 88 color photographs, glossary. $24.95 paper

In 2002, Amherst College acquired Ulli and Georgina Beier's substantial collection of Yoruba textiles, along with their field photographs, video footage, unpublished research papers, and some unspecified "artifacts." Cloth Only Wears to Shreds: Yoruba Textiles and Photographs from the Beier Collection is the first publication to emerge from this unique collection. Coauthored by Rowland Abiodun, Ulli Beier, and John Pemberton, this well-illustrated, 128-page volume was published in conjunction with Amherst's recent exhibition of Beier's textiles and field photographs. The catalog focuses mainly on Yoruba textiles and, to a lesser extent, on Beier's photographs, while also painting an interesting portrait of Ulli Beier himself.

In their introductory tribute to Beier, Abiodun and Pemberton liken him to Are, a Yoruba term for people who are

   permanent strangers, always discovering
   and exploring new territories, transforming
   themselves, ever in pursuit of
   their ori, their inner spiritual head, their
   personal destiny. As they make their life
   journeys into relatively unfamiliar territories,
   searching for inspiration and
   illumination, they shape the social, religious,
   and intellectual visions of those
   with whom they interact (p. 11).

This characterization seems fitting for Beier. Scarred by the many obstacles he endured as a Jew raised in Germany during the Nazi era, Beier sought refuge in Nigeria in the early 1950s, where he began teaching English. Subsequently, he would found numerous publications (such as Odu and Black Orpheus), inspire a modern Yoruba theater with Duro Lapido, and originate the Oshogbo School of Art with his wife Georgina. The Amherst collection is a valuable resource for the study of Beier and his many artistic accomplishments in Nigeria.

With its 162 pieces, the Amherst collection testifies to the Beier's love for Yoruba textiles. The catalog features forty of them, including a large number of adire (indigo resist cloths), several embroidered men's robes, several types of men's and women's weaving, and silk-screened and hand-painted cloths designed by such renowned Oshogbo artists as Twins Seven Seven and Jacob Ofolabi. Each of the cloths is illustrated in brilliant, full-page color plates, which alone make this catalog an immensely useful tool for research and teaching.

It also features two good essays on textiles that help to bring the collection into focus. John Pemberton's is about technique and aesthetics. He gives a useful breakdown of the various cloth types in the Beier collection and concise descriptions of how they are made. There is also a good section on the few rather wonderful Oshogbo examples, which he defines appropriately as both products of the Oshogbo art movement and extensions of traditional textile production. For context, Pemberton includes many of his excellent field photographs of people making or wearing cloth and shares his rich field data on men's ceremonial dress from the Ile-Orangun region.

Rowland Abiodun's essay takes a very different path by looking at Yoruba cloth and its connection to the divine realm, with particular emphasis on Egungun, Sango, and royalty. As a native speaker, he is able to weave in a rich array of cloth-related proverbs and oral texts to support his thesis that Yoruba cloth is clothing for the gods if not, as he titles his essay, "the fabric of immortality" (p. 39). One particularly poignant phase, taken from Ifa divination and used as the catalog's title, is "cloth only wears to shreds." Its meaning is that while cloth may deteriorate, its deep associations with royalty and divinity live on forever. Abiodun explores his divinity theme in yet another way by proposing that divine imagery may have even inspired the patterns on adire, itself a very secular cloth. He uses as evidence a photograph that Beier had taken of an Obatala shrine in Ogbomosho featuring painted imagery closely resembling that of adire.

Might Beier himself have seen such a relationship? We would never know from his own essay, the last in the catalog, in which, regrettably, he says nothing about his textiles. At the very least, Beier could have helped to pin down information about the origins or dates of the cloth. As is, such information is overly generalized. All the cloths are labeled simply as "twentieth century," when even "second half of the twentieth century" would have offered more specificity, as few would have dated prior to the early 1950s, when Beier first arrived.

It seems likely that Beier was encouraged to write about his photographs (the other theme of the catalogue), but that too is underplayed in the essay. He talks only briefly about his experience photographing the Yoruba and offers no commentary on his black-and-white photographs that illustrate the chapter.