African Arts — Global Conversations

How does a late nineteenth or early twentieth century Kuba mask from the Democratic Republic of the Congo relate to Gilbert Stuart’s 1796 portrait of George Washington? What ensues when we place vessels from twentieth and twenty-first century ceramicists working in Seoul, Nairobi, and Lagos in dialogue? African Arts—Global Conversations endeavored to answer these innovative queries. The exhibition cultivated a deeper understanding of African art through a global lens. While contemporary African art tends to be curated with transnational histories in mind, there has been less focus on situating classical and modern African art within a global canon. Kristen Windmuller-Luna, at the time the Sills Family Consulting Curator, African Arts, at the Brooklyn Museum, placed key works from the longue durée of African art history in other departments—American, European, Asian, Ancient Egyptian—as part of a multifloor installation. Global Conversations is a title apropos to the dialogue encouraged by experimental thematic groupings, which avoided presenting a teleological and periodized history of art. The exhibition was transparent about its art historical inheritance and, accordingly, about the political and intellectual impetus behind the curatorial decisions. The first-floor gallery of the exhibition was a visual and textual introduction to important themes in an international context, such as modernism, feminism, and architecture. A Freetown, Sierra Leone Mask for the Ordehlay (mid-twentieth century) was on display beside an ancient Greek statue, Serapis (30 bce–395 ce), under the theme of transculturalism (Fig. 1). Ordehlay association masks contain iconographic influences from Chinese cinema, Yoruba masquerade, and the water spirit Mami Wata. Like the transcultural Ordehlay mask, Serapis was a god created by Egypt’s Ptolemaic rulers for the purpose of Greeks and Egyptians worshipping the same deity together. On the topic of multiple modernities, a painting by Ghanaian artist Atta Kwami (b. 1956), Another Time, Ɣebubuɣi (2011) (Fig. 2) was placed in dialogue with Study for Homage to the Square “High Tenor” (1959) by American artist Josef Albers (1888–1976). Eschewing a singular Euro-American narrative, this pairing illustrates how abstraction crafts multiple modernisms. In addition to a wide range of artworks, there were art history textbooks on display in a vitrine: a range from the 1930s to 1970s, including examples like Hendrik Willem van Loon and Grace Castagnetta’s The Arts (1937) and H.W. Janson’s History of Art (1970). These books, opened at distinct pages with highlighted paragraphs as archetypal examples, 1 Global Conversations installation view, Mask for the Ordehlay (Ode-Lay) or Jollay Society (mid-20th century) on the left and Serapis on the right.