The Arts of Africa: Studying and Conserving the Collection, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts by Richard B. Woodward, Ash Duhrkoop, Ndubuisi Ezeluomba, Sheila Payaqui, Ainslie Harrison, Casey Mallinckrodt, and Kathryn Brugioni Gabrielli

Abstract

This catalogue, dedicated to the permanent collection of African art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia, is innovative in both approach and form and makes a distinct contribution to the genre of museum catalogues centered on African art in major museum collections. The Arts of Africa emphasizes scientific analysis and conservation, providing a perspective that has not been applied to a book­length, compre­ hensive treatment of an African art collection in a major US museum. Objects that were the subject of analysis by the conservation depart­ ment cover a wide geographic and temporal expanse, from a depiction of the Last Supper from eighteenth­century Ethiopia to a Twins Seven­Seven work. Instead of treating objects as exemplars of particular types, the emphasis on conservation as a mode of inquiry consid­ ers the specific objects within the collection. The conservation perspective brings into focus a central argument and structuring principle of the book: the biographies of objects do not end with their entry into the museum. Instead, the works continue to acquire meaning in their interactions with new audiences and their transplantation into a new environment. The publication is notable for these efforts to make the museum a self­conscious presence, an element of the objects’ stories. Accordingly, the conventional photographs of isolated objects are complemented by photographs representing objects within the life of the museum, including in the context of educa­ tional programs, in the galleries, and in the conservation lab. The Arts of Africa was published to mark the end of a multiyear, cross­departmental, Mellon Foundation­funded initiative that aimed to apply expertise in the fields of cura­ tion and conservation to the study of African art objects. It is the second publication from the VMFA’s African art collection; the earlier catalogue (Woodward 2000) was consider­ ably shorter—94 pages, compared to the 296 pages in this volume. While The Arts of Africa is accessible to nonspecialist audiences, the most seasoned expert will surely appreciate the unique perspectives on even the most canoni­ cal works. For example, the inclusion of rarely seen views of objects, like the back of a flour sack painting by Congolese artist Tshibumba Kanda­Matulu, provide literally new per­ spectives to complement the methodological contributions. The book consists of an introduction, six chapters, and three appendices. Chapters 1 and 2 cover the early history of African art at the VMFA and the establishment of the museum’s permanent collection. Chapter 3 outlines the changing conceptions of the goals of conservation for African art, addressing ethical as well as aesthetic concerns. By far the largest section of the book, chapter 4 details findings of the conservation initiative in relation to specific objects in the collection. Chapters 5 and 6 contextualize the collection of the VMFA within larger trajectories of the display and collection of African art in the West and contemporary trends in the field of African art. Richard B. Woodward, founding curator of the African collection at the VMFA, begins the introduction, appropriately enough, with the first African artwork acquired by the museum. Since the collection’s inception in 1977 with a Bwoom mask from the Kuba kingdom, the number of works has grown to over 1,000. Woodward notes that these works are material accumulations of many different stories, using the Bwoom mask to illustrate his point. From use in performances to the loss of its accompanying costume during the process of acquisition, the mask provides evidence of the “invisible web of people, ideas, histories, technologies, and commerce” that have shaped its biography (p. 1). Chapter 1, also by Woodward, recounts the early history of African art at the VMFA, an institution that began as a small regional museum whose exhibitions centered on Vir­ ginia artists. African art first appeared in the VMFA’s galleries in the company of European modernism in a 1941 exhibition displaying works from the Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. collec­ tion. Two sculptures, a Kota reliquary figure and a Yaka mask, were exhibited alongside the European works. Just the next year, the museum saw a more significant display of undermining of female economic indepen­ dence. This is a productive angle, but Mobutu’s gender politics, as well as all other aspects of his rule, cannot be reduced to responses to the colonial past. Similar arguments could be made in relation to the works of Senga and Kongo Astronauts: When they revisit the cold war era or the Mobutu regime, they may not do so only from a desire to problematize the aftermaths of colonialism, but also as attempts at deploying a historicity not fully contained within colonialism. By contrast, while Baloji’s Mémoire includes a photograph that spe­ cifically takes Mobutu and the postcolonial moment as the archival components of its montage, other images in the series construct explicit dialogues between the colonial past and the postcolonial present, in an unmediated way that is absent from the projects discussed in other chapters of Nugent’s study. At the same time, it is worth noting that in several more recent projects, Baloji has worked with materials and forms associated to various precolonial traditions in Katanga, Kasai, and beyond. These projects continue to engage with history and memory, but they interrogate legacies that seem to bypass colonialism. While Colonial Legacies may have further insisted on the idea that Congolese artists both center and decenter the colonial period in their practices, the book offers a highly stimulating study of critical artistic interventions nonetheless. It will appeal to readers interested in Congolese history, contemporary art, photography, and the making of new archives for the present.