Pulling Museum Mile Uptown

SHE was sometimes by his side when William C. Thompson Jr. worked the rubber-chicken circuit last year, a poised, attractive woman in no rush to pose for the cameras, confident that her husband, the New York City comptroller, could make his own case for why he deserved to be mayor.

Elsie McCabe Thompson was perhaps an underused asset in her husband’s narrowly unsuccessful campaign against Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Smart, articulate and charming, she emerged infrequently from the shadows to talk to reporters. When she did, she often also spoke of something else dear to her heart: the Museum for African Art.

Now after more than a decade pursuing what some saw as an impossible quest Mrs. Thompson is preparing to open the museum’s new $95 million home on upper Fifth Avenue next spring.
“Maybe I’m just contrary,” she said during an interview this month, “but the more people tell me it can’t be done, the more I want to prove that it can.”

Even as her husband steps back (temporarily, he says) from public life, Mrs. Thompson has emerged as the increasingly visible president of the 26-year-old museum as it completes an unlikely journey from a temporary office in Queens to Manhattan’s cultural center stage.

On Fifth Avenue between 109th and 110th Streets, the museum will occupy the lower floors of a 19-story condominium designed by Robert A. M. Stern and will extend New York’s Museum Mile uptown into Harlem. The limestone-colored building, with window mullions that lyrically evoke the weave of African baskets, will become a high-profile showplace for one of the only two major American museums devoted solely to African art. (The other is the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art in Washington.)

The hoopla associated with its arrival will be a coming-out party of sorts for Mrs. Thompson, who, if her husband has his way, would one day become the city’s first lady.

Mrs. Thompson, 51, had singular qualifications to shepherd the museum project when officials tapped her to lead the institution in 1997. Though not an art historian, she was a Harvard-trained lawyer (and Eliot Spitzer’s moot court partner in law school) who had once held a high post in city government, clearly understood its mechanics and had established her own viable ties to the Harlem political leadership.



And as the project moved forward, it did not hurt that she was the close friend and later spouse of Mr. Thompson, who held one of the city’s most powerful offices and remains today one of the front-runners for the 2013 Democratic mayoral nomination.

So far of the $71 million raised in construction funds for the museum, some $32 million has come from public funds, though Mr. Thompson said he has had only the most limited of roles in securing them.

The road ahead for the museum looks unremittingly steep however. It does not have an endowment. It is projecting an operating budget of as much as $8 million a year, or almost triple its current expenses, and it is doing so at a time when the aftermath of the recession has made both public and private donors cautious about taking on any new financial commitments.

“Long before the recession these new buildings were struggling to pay operating costs,” said Gail Lord, the co-president of Lord Cultural Resources, an advisory firm with cultural clients around the world. “The recession only made it worse.”

Small, specialized museums have the hardest time because they cannot realize economies of scale, Ms. Lord said, though she was impressed that the Museum for African Art had done enough planning actually to know what its budget would be.

Museum board members say they will be able to tap additional resources, perhaps by selling the naming rights to the building, as long as the person is a good fit for the museum. (They estimate that they could get as much as $50 million for this.)

And it is not as if Mrs. Thompson and her board have not overcome numerous other hurdles. The museum’s original development partner pulled out. Then there was a lengthy and at times contentious public approval process, the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, known as Ulurp. Before construction the engineers had to adjust the foundation plan to account for unstable sediment. Mrs. Thompson said the remaining obstacles were “nothing more onerous than what we’ve already had to deal with.”


Mrs. Thompson is the mother of twins, and with her wide smile and a slightly husky voice, she exudes a kind of matriarchal warmth, even toward the museum. She hugs. She describes the museum as “my baby,” and she will interrupt a conversation to dab at a stain on a female colleague’s shirt.

“I wanted my kids, my little African-American kids, to be proud of being African-American,” she said recently to explain her passion for the museum. A native New Yorker, she worked for the law firm Shearman & Sterling before joining the administration of Mayor David N. Dinkins.

Afterward, when she was turned down for jobs because she did not have experience running a big nonprofit, she founded one, devoted to bringing computer technology and training to poor urban neighborhoods.

She makes no apologies for knowing little about African art when she took the museum job. “I sought to learn a lot, and I did,” she said.

After opening in 1984 in an Upper East Side town house, the museum developed a reputation for innovative exhibitions, but its fund-raising was low. For many years it was located in SoHo, but the space was rented, making it hard to plan.

When Mrs. Thompson saw the Fifth Avenue site, she said, she fell in love. The location, at the juncture of Harlem and Museum Mile, was symbolic, and it was close to audiences the museum wanted to reach. The first development plan called for a partnership with Edison Schools, the for-profit manager of public schools. Edison would help pay for the purchase of the land, some of which was city owned, and would build offices and a flagship school, whose students could use the museum. But Edison backed out in 2002, after it ran into financial difficulties.

This current project is being undertaken with new development partners, Brickman and Sidney Fetner Associates, who are building luxury condominiums. The developers paid most of the cost of the land and built the core and shell of the museum. At a news conference for the project in 2007 Mayor Bloomberg praised the museum as an important addition to Museum Mile. The ceremonial groundbreaking that year was attended by a raft of public officials, including Gov. Eliot Spitzer, Lt. Gov. David A. Paterson, Representative Charles B. Rangel and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer.

By this time Mrs. Thompson had been dating the comptroller, a longtime friend, for more than a year. Her husband, Eugene L. McCabe, the president of North General Hospital in Harlem, had died in 1998, and Mr. Thompson had filed for divorce in 2005.

Mr. Thompson said in an interview that his future wife had called him over the years, as she did many people, seeking support for the museum. But he said he had not provided any assistance beyond a call to a deputy mayor when the museum was seeking to secure the land from the city and a 2005 conversation about funds with the City Council speaker, Gifford Miller. The conversation with Mr. Miller took place in April 2005, according to Mr. Miller’s appointment diaries, about a month after Mr. Thompson had recused himself from all museum matters because of the personal relationship. Mr. Miller, as reported this year in The Village Voice, ended up committing $750,000 in city capital funds to the project that year.

But Mr. Thompson said it had been Mr. Miller who had contacted him about the museum, not the other way around. Mr. Miller said he could not recall the conversation or who had initiated it. Mr. Thompson said that it was his wife who had persuaded government officials to support the project. “They all know Elsie on her own, not because of me,” he said.

The museum has set an ambitious slate of loan exhibitions for its first few months, including the first-ever career retrospective of the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui; a show comparing African baskets with those made in the American South; and an exhibition of ancient sculptures from Nigeria, organized by the museum and the Fundación Marcelino Botín in Spain. (The museum’s own permanent collection is small, with around 400 works.)

Mrs. Thompson said she expects to draw more than the approximately 225,000 yearly visitors who go to the Museum of the City of New York, several blocks south on Fifth Avenue. She also expects substantial revenue from a restaurant; the sale of African jewelry, textiles and other items; and from leasing an event space.

In part to bolster its donor contributions, the museum has expanded its board to 22 members (with a goal of 25); those added recently include the artist Martin Puryear and Mannie Jackson, the Harlem Globetrotters’ chairman. To save money the museum may open only certain sections next April. Adjusting expectations has been essential to keep the project on track, and Mrs. Thompson said that her own expectations have been challenged as she has confronted the works of art she now spends her days with.

She had initially found a wooden spirit figure from Congo alien and frightening with its surface covered by nails. But she came to learn that each of the nails represented an oath or prayer — for example, a ritual prayer for the harvest or the resolution of a dispute between neighbors. “It represents the hopes and dreams, the fears, the prayers, the aspirations of a single community of people for generations,” she said of the sculpture. “For me that’s what resonated.”

She hopes that the museum will bring Africa, long misunderstood as a “dark, distant place,” out of the shadows, she said. Its debut will certainly usher Mrs. Thompson further into the spotlight, a place she may one day inhabit even more prominently depending upon the political future.

Source: The NY Times
BY: Kate Taylor

Smithsonian Leads Recovery of Haiti's Art and Culture

Haiti's recovery from the devastating earthquake in January requires more than rebuilding structures, but also repairing tattered paintings and cultural objects still buried in the rubble, the Caribbean nation's first lady Elisabeth Preval said Thursday.

She visited the Smithsonian Institution to open an exhibit of children's artwork created after the earthquake, calling it a reminder that Haiti still needs help. The paintings and drawings will be on view through the summer. She also discussed the importance of an effort by the U.S. museum complex to lead a cultural recovery effort in Port-au-Prince, where there are few, if any, professionally trained art conservators.

"This is fundamental for our nation," Preval told The Associated Press during her Washington visit. "This is our cultural heritage. This is us."

The Smithsonian leased a building in Haiti's capital that once housed the United Nations Development Programme to create a conservation center where experts from U.S. museums can repair artworks and train Haitians to perform the intricate restoration work.

The first paintings were taken to the center last week. Experts carefully began vacuuming destructive dust from the paintings, repairing tears and "inpainting" damaged areas so it appears nothing happened, Smithsonian conservator Hugh Shockey wrote on his blog.

As many as 10,000 paintings and sculptures by Haitian masters were buried when the Musee d'Art Nader collapsed in the earthquake, said Richard Kurin, the Smithsonian's undersecretary for history, art and culture. Thousands of other objects are buried elsewhere, tracing Haiti's struggle for independence, its abolition of slavery and other cultural milestones.

"Imagine in the United States ... if every Smithsonian museum collapsed, the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the White House, the U.S. Congress all collapsed," Kurin said. "At some point we'd probably say it's worth pulling out the Star-Spangled Banner, the Declaration of Independence."

The oldest objects to be recovered date back to Haiti's indigenous people from before the arrival of Christopher Columbus.

Some artifacts have been recovered by hand. Others will require sophisticated engineering and heavy equipment.

Murals painted on the walls of the Episcopal Holy Trinity Cathedral that depict scenes from the Bible have been a central focus. They date to prominent artists from the 1950s and are cherished as part of Haiti's cultural heritage. Some crumbled with the church but at least four remain mostly intact and can be saved, Kurin said. Experts are still trying to determine how.

The effort has been primarily funded with private dollars. The Broadway League trade association made the largest gift of $276,000, while the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities and U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Sciences contributed $30,000 each. Smithsonian officials are working to raise more money to sustain the effort, Kurin said.

The involvement of U.S. cultural agencies also is a response to the looting of Iraqi treasures in 2003. Broadway producer Margo Lion, who co-chairs the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, said cultural recovery is a priority after Americans were accused of neglecting cultural preservation during the invasion of Iraq.

Conservators plan to turn over most of the work to Haitian professionals by November 2011.

During her visit to Washington, Preval helped open an exhibit of 100 paintings and drawings by Haitian children after the earthquake with the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art. They will be on view through October.

Art has provided healing for children as a way for them to express their emotions, Preval said.

"My dream and my hope is to make sure the world does not forget Haiti," Preval said of the exhibit. She hopes it can help draw more support to overhaul Haiti's schools, beginning with early childhood education, she said.

The display includes paintings by U.S. first lady Michelle Obama and Jill Biden, wife of Vice President Joe Biden, from their April visit to Port-au-Prince. At the direction of a 5-year-old boy, Obama painted a colorful fish and Biden painted a house.

The Smithsonian Folklife Festival beginning June 24 on the National Mall also will feature artists from Haiti. Some of their work will be sold to benefit Haiti's cultural revival.

Source: Google

Sotheby's Oceanic and African Art Sale Earns $8.4 Million

Sotheby’s concluded its June sales of Oceanic and African art in Paris on Wednesday, achieving a total of $8,448,741.

Of the 82 lots on offer, 12 works from the collection of Marsha and John Friede spurred a fierce bidding competition, with many pieces exceeding their estimates. The highest-earning work in the sale was an early-19th-century Hembigurea ancestor figure from the Congo, which fetched $1,042,109 above the high estimate of $619,150. This June marks the 50th anniversary of the Congo's independence.

Other top lots included a 42-inch carved female figure by a craftsman of the Inyai-Ewa People, which earned $685,133; the work had previously been in the collection of Douglas Newton, a former curator, who built The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Another crouching female figure that had been included in the first show of Oceanic art in the U.S., at Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York in 1934, was sold for $476,897, a price that more than doubled the high estimate.

Oceanic art has inspired numerous modern masters such as Paul Klee, Alberto Giacometti, and Pablo Picasso. The sales in New York last month and Paris on Wednesday showed a continued global interest in collecting this category as they achieved strong prices far exceeding the estimates.

Source: artinfo.com
By: Louise Chen

South Africa's Booming Art Market

In recent years, African artists have seen their work increase in value as they attract global investors.

South Africa, in particular, has seen a significant rise in prices paid out for major works, according to Strauss and Co, a Johannesburg auction house selling 20th Century art.
Prices for major South African art are estimated to have increased by over 500 percent in the past five to 10 years, according to the auction house.

In recent years a new world record was set for a still-life by a South African artist when a stunning piece by Irma Stern sold for more than one million dollars.

Only halfway through the year, Strauss and Co. says it has already earned more from sales this year than in the whole of 2009.

Among the beneficiaries is Johannesburg-based William Kentridge, who is perhaps the closest the African art world has to a rock star.

He is one of Africa's most commercially successful artists and his work is in demand around the globe.

But he acknowledged that the market for contemporary art is small. "A lot of work gets sold to institutions and wealthy patronizing collectors -- patrons of the art," Kentridge told CNN.

"The number of people that actually seriously collect, and are interested, and travel to exhibitions, and are knowledgeable about it is tiny. But they form the bulk of the collectors of contemporary art."

In South Africa the pool of people buying serious art is even smaller. Most are white businesspeople. The country's emerging black middle class and wealthy have not yet started buying South African contemporary art in the same way the newly monied classes snapped up art in China and India.

Ross Douglas organizes the Johannesburg Art Fair. He told CNN, "What we saw in China and India was that they suddenly got very rich and they started buying contemporary art at the same time the international art market started buying it. And one supported the other.

"In Africa there is very little local buying of contemporary art and that's why artists go abroad. But that will change, slowly."

There are signs that change is already happening. Young South African artists like Lawrence Lemaoana and Mary Sibanda earn a living from their art, which didn't happen five years ago.

"As an artist you have to work extra hard," said Sibanda. "You have to keep reinventing yourself because you can't keep showing the same thing over and over again."

They rely on galleries and the Johannesburg Art Fair -- the only major art fair in Africa -- to introduce their work to South Africans.

Lemaoana told CNN, "It is a great platform for introducing the normal public into walking into a gallery. Because one of the things we struggle with in South Africa is the idea of culture, and how culture is limited to a few people.

"I think it's an interesting way of inviting Joe Soap to walk in and maybe buy an artwork."
Before the economic meltdown, South African corporations such as big banks or mobile phone companies were the main investors in local art.

But gallery owners say those companies have cut back in the past two years, reasoning it might be difficult to explain to shareholders why they were buying art in the middle of the global credit crunch.

Those sentiments have been echoed in global art capitals such as New York and London.

"There was a huge bubble of extraordinary prices being paid for contemporary work, and that took a knock," said Kentridge.

"It was astonishing how short that was. I think what happens when you have the crash in the art market the way you had in the late 1980s.

"There was a period in which it was very easy for galleries to survive and make money and do well; it's much harder now."

But at the top end of the market at least, things seem to be picking up. Which could be good news for those who were early investors in mid-20th century South African art.

Source: CNN
By: Robyn Curnow

Art museum calls in tribal expert for work on tepee

One hundred twenty-five years ago, Standing Bear created the painted canvas tepee that has been the centerpiece of the Denver Art Museum's American Indian exhibit for the past two decades.

On Wednesday, under the direction of two tribal elders, the tepee was taken down for the renovation of the third floor of the north building.

"The renovation gives us a chance to rotate out artifacts," said museum spokeswoman Kristy Bassuener. "People can get to know new favorites."

Kiowa Nation elder John Emhoolah directed the disassembly, which required more than 10 people.

Emhoolah has disassembled thousands of tepees, Native Arts collection curator Nancy Blomberg said.

The museum needed his help because John Emhoolah, center, who is a member of the Kiowa nation, pulls a string out so it can be unwound from the top of a historic teepee as it is disassembled for cleaning.

"It is not a sacred object," she said. "We had elders come because there's a specific sequence in which you take it down."

Before the canvas cover could be rolled back, starting at each end along the angled wood poles, short wood pegs on the floor and the door latches had to be removed.

Then, together with the rolled-up canvas, the first of about 15 poles was taken off.

The structural heart of the tepee is a tripod of three poles tied together at the top. The other poles are interlaced outside of those with a separate rope. The rope was unwound by passing it around the tepee while people held onto the poles. They removed one pole at a time until they reached the final three, which were taken away still tied together.

The beige canvas is covered with detailed paintings of horses and tribal members. The tepee will be vacuumed and its surface will be cleaned. Next February, when the exhibit reopens, the tepee will return, Bassuener said.

About 50 of the current pieces will be brought out again, along with about 500 other objects from the museum's collection. There are around 18,000 artifacts in the Native Arts collection, Bassuener said.

"This is an opportunity to highlight the collection," Blomberg said. "And also to be able to show people the depth of the collection."

Source: The Denver Post
By: Sarah Horn

The Tribal Rug Market Takes Flight

A leaf-patterned blue rug from the courtly heyday of 17th-century Iran (above) sold at Christie's this spring for $9.6 million, 20 times its asking price—and the highest price ever paid for a rug. Several months earlier, Sotheby's sold a rug from the late 1500s for $4.3 million, the going rate for a top sculpture by Alexander Calder.

Oriental rugs, once the obsession of Ottoman sultans, European nobles and American robber barons, rarely topped $2 million a decade ago. Now, these centuries-old carpets from Turkey, Iran, and the Caucasus are commanding sums more often reserved for masterpiece paintings than floor coverings.

A patchwork of global collectors and institutions are fueling the rise. New museums across the Middle East and Europe are driving up prices as they build collections of Islamic art. Contemporary-art buyers from Singapore to the Silicon Valley are rolling out antique rugs to complement the abstract, geometric art works that hang on their walls. And everyone is on the lookout for the next little-noticed niche of the market that could see a spike in value.
As the global art market recovers, collectors are once again scouring the marketplace for new areas to exploit. Pastoral landscapes and gilded table clocks—antiques that once would have been too stuffy for high-spending art collectors—have emerged as some of the market's newest favorites. Buyers who bid up trendy contemporary art works during the boom only to see them plummet in value during the recession are seeking out more obscure pieces whose values could rise with an overall market upswing.

Rugs are typically classified by the circumstances in which they were made—hand-woven by tribal nomads, crafted in a village or city, or woven on looms in a royal workshop—and prices tend to rise along the same lines, according to Jon Thompson, a British rug scholar. Those woven by tribes or in villages are on the lower end of the scale, commanding prices anywhere from $2,500 to $300,000. Persian court rugs made in royal workshops during the 15th and 16th centuries and featuring pastel, botanical designs, are particularly popular with collectors of Impressionist art, and their prices have been soaring into the millions.

The wealthy have collected Oriental rugs for centuries. Henry VIII owned several hundred Turkish rugs. Hans Holbein, Cornelius Vanderbilt and Sigmund Freud, who kept a rug draped over the couch where he conducted his psychoanalytic sessions, were Persian-rug aficionados.
These days, top antique rugs are sold more like works of art than pieces of décor. Some high-end rug dealers even eschew the retail system of pricing by the square foot, because their collectors will pay higher prices for small prayer rugs and rare rug fragments than for palatial floor coverings. In recent months, sales have been slower for pieces that are frayed or of mediocre quality, but values have climbed sharply for the best surviving examples, according to appraisers and auction records.

Many buyers of modern art like television producer Douglas Cramer, a founder of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, are turning to tribal rugs speckled with jewel-toned, geometric shapes. Chicago real-estate developer Ron Benach, who owns pieces by Willem de Kooning and Gerhard Richter, is also a rug collector.

Jon Schreiber, a 56-year-old medical-equipment investor from Oakland, Calif., is on a quest to amass the world's best collection of antique tribal rugs. For the past three decades, he's been tracking down rugs woven two centuries ago by the 85 nomadic groups listed in a 1981 landmark study of weavers from the Caucasus, a craggy region between the Black and Caspian seas. So far, Mr. Schreiber has paid up to $225,000 apiece for 84 museum-quality varieties that represent each of the region's tribes or rug styles. His hunt for the lone holdout—a rug representing the 85th style called the Pinwheel Kazak—is intensifying.

Curators at Washington's Textile Museum say few rug collectors have ever come close to achieving Mr. Schreiber's goal of finding a top example representing every Caucasian rug in the canon, so to speak. The museum's founder, George Hewitt Myers, spent much of the early 1900s collecting Caucasian rugs and found fewer than 85 types, says curator Sumru Belger Krody. New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art has gathered 48 varieties from the region, and Boston's Museum of Fine Arts has around 20 Caucasian rugs.

Word of Mr. Schreiber's quest has already spread to a few of the country's rug cognoscenti. Mark Hopkins, a collector in Lincoln, Mass., praises Mr. Schreiber for focusing on a worthy niche but criticizes his comprehensive focus as "stamp collecting"—an approach that's based on numerical obsession as much as artistic appreciation. Kurt Munkacsi, past president of New York's Hajji Baba Club, says he tried to amass a similar set of Turkmen tribal rugs years ago before deciding the task was "impossible."

"In this world, there are lumpers and splitters—people who are fine with finding important overall pieces and people who try to identify every subgroup imaginable, like they're botanists looking for new plant species," Mr. Munkacsi said. "I'm a lumper. This guy's a splitter."
Mr. Schreiber, in turn, says some collectors give up too soon, but he's "willing to compete for what I want."

A lanky man with shaggy gray hair, Mr. Schreiber pays little attention to the volatile swings of the contemporary art market. Instead, he has learned to navigate an eclectic subculture where brand names are valued less than silky wool or rare natural dyes. Rug collectors often meet in groups like the Hajji Baba Club in New York, but Mr. Schreiber has mostly shopped solo, relying on a network of global dealers to scour and trade for pieces on his wish list. So far, he's spent at least $2 million on his pursuit.

When his local dealer, Jan David Winitz, stopped by for a visit earlier this month, the two men padded around Mr. Schreiber's unassuming three-bedroom home in stocking feet because nearly every inch of every room was covered in rugs made before the Civil War. A rug estimated at $18,000 lay on the bedroom floor of Mr. Schreiber's 13-year-old son. Others hung on the walls like tapestry, their colorful patterns depicting everything from peacocks to pixel-like symbols reminiscent of hieroglyphics and Atari video games.

Mr. Winitz joked about the paucity of furniture in the living room, but Mr. Schreiber just shrugged: "I like to roll out different pieces all the time, and furniture gets in the way."
Like Scottish tartans or Navajo blankets, antique rugs offer clues about the lives and folklore of ancient peoples. Archaeologists in 1949 discovered a carpet in a frozen Siberian tomb that dated to the 4th or 5th centuries B.C. A culture of weavers eventually stretched from Indonesia to Istanbul. Most weavers were women who could spend months or years creating a single piece for their families or the marketplace. Ottoman rulers built elaborate rug workshops as well, with workers who created purple and pink dyes by pulverizing sea snails and cochineal insects, respectively.

Aristocratic collectors have long acquired the rugs created in Persian-rug workshops, but Caucasian rugs made by tribal groups have steadily gained favor with collectors since the 1960s, particularly in America, Italy and Germany. The most coveted Caucasian rugs were hand-woven during the 18th and 19th centuries by the dozens of nomadic shepherd families who once dominated the steppes and mountains of modern-day Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan. Their signature dye colors are geranium red and indigo blue, and their designs are peppered with good-luck symbols and playful images of chickens, carnations, and diagonal stripes. Some imagery is sacred, including a fan-like whirling orb that stands for the wheel of life.

In July 2007, an anonymous collector paid Philadelphia auction house Freeman's $341,625 for a 5-foot-wide Caucasian rug called an Eagle Kazak. It was only priced to sell for up to $25,000.
Collectors often shy from Caucasian rugs woven after 1900 because assimilation and the Soviet conquest of the region took a toll on the quality of nomadic life and their rugs' craftsmanship, said William Robinson, head of Christie's rug department.

Growing up in New York, Mr. Schreiber was enthralled by the images and colors that popped from the six Caucasian rugs his grandmother brought with her from the family's homeland in Germany. While studying medicine in college in Jerusalem, he befriended a curator at the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art and became equally smitten with Persian and Turkish rug motifs. By the time he settled outside the hills of San Francisco in 1977, a bohemian aesthetic was popular and he began to buy antique rugs of all styles and designations, from Bidjar to Laver.
He didn't hit upon the idea of acquiring a complete Caucasian roster until the early 1990s, when he realized he already had 25 varieties of Kazaks, Kubas, and Shirvan Bakus. Mr. Winitz, his nearby dealer, offered to draw up a checklist and offer him any "blanks" he came across over time.

Mr. Winitz initially considered the idea an intellectual (and commercial) lark, but the hunting got harder eight years ago once Mr. Schreiber crossed the 60-number mark, he said. Some Caucasian groups like the Karabaghs near the southern border of modern-day Iran sold rugs to outsiders by the dozen, but only one town in the Shirvan district ever made rugs featuring fan-tailed birds, called Akstafas, by which their rarer rugs are now known.
Mr. Winitz turned to a network of buyers in Milan, Munich and Istanbul. After three years of diplomatic cajoling, he got a Chicago collector to trade a 17th-century Turkish fragment for No. 82, a rug known as the Cloudband Kazak.

No. 83, a creamy Marasali Shirvan, dotted with shapes that look like seed pods, came from Mr. Winitz's own collection, and No. 84, a Star Kazak, arrived three years ago when a South African collector decided to trade it for a Turkish rug fragment, Mr. Schreiber said. Since then, no hits.
Mr. Schreiber still needs the Pinwheel Kazak, a rug distinguished by a central swirling four-pointed star shape. The Kazaks who once lived near the Georgian capital of Tbilisi popularized the Pinwheel style in the 1800s, according to Ian Bennett's book "Oriental Rugs," the 1981 study that's served as Mr. Schreiber's collecting framework.

Mr. Schreiber says he knows of only six "great ones" in private hands—two in Germany, two in Italy, and two in America. He says the two American owners won't budge—his dealers have asked—so he's brainstorming ways to win over the Europeans. It's futile to trek into the mountain regions and scour for it directly, he says, because the Kazaks who are still there sold off their best antiques right after the Cold War and no longer do much weaving.

He says he's imagined the euphoria he will feel upon completing his Caucasian set. He might exhibit them; he might not. His children enjoy his collection, but he's not sure they'll keep the set intact over the long term.

In the meantime, he's adopted a coping mechanism that all hard-core collectors seem to share: a distraction collection. "Runners," he said, pointing the swelling pile of narrow rugs splayed down his hallway. "I'm collecting them like mad right now."

Source: The Wall Street Journal
By: Kelly Crow

“Pattern, Costume and Ornament” Explores the Meanings of Decoration in Contemporary African and African-American Art

“Pattern, Costume and Ornament” opened at the Birmingham Museum of Art on June 6 in the Bohourfoush Gallery. The works gathered in the exhibition were created by African and African-American artists and drawn from the Museum's permanent collection and from local private collections.

Ron Platt, The Hugh Kaul Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, organized the exhibition. “These works are united by a visual presentation that emphasizes eye-catching arrangements, attention to detail and embellishment, and often both,” says Platt.

Functional objects, including a quilt and a Haitian vodou flag, mingle with contemporary painting, sculpture and photography. Each work invites the viewer to consider the diverse cultural influences on personal identity, reaching out to ancestry, tradition, and community for iconography and understanding.

Aside from the complex meanings they evoke, these works also can be valued simply for the visual pleasure they impart. Eye-catching arrangements, attention to details, and interesting use of common materials draw the viewer into the pieces.

The exhibition “Pattern, Costume and Ornament” includes the following works, as well as others:

Imminence (1976)

Founded in the 1960s by the artist, Jeff Donaldson, and a small group of other African-American artists, the AFRICOBRA movement was intended to herald a new black aesthetic that drew on African traditions, political awareness, and community engagement. This portrait of Donaldson and his own family is suffused with the symmetrical patterns and improvisatory nature of West African visual culture. In doing so, he pays homage to Africa and his ancestral lineage. The work’s title may well refer to the forthcoming birth of his second child. Imminence is a 2009 addition to the Museum’s collection, acquired with funds from the Museum's Sankofa Society: Friends of African-American and African Art.

Old Salem: A Family of Stranger, Series Two (1995)

Fred Wilson's photographs of 19th-century cloth dolls, lovingly costumed and personalized by African African-American artisans in Old Salem, North Carolina, provide a vital historical counterbalance to the overwhelmingly negative portrayals of black Americans from that time. The arrangement of photographs on a long wall in the Bohourfoush Gallery evokes a family tree.

I Looked and Looked and Failed to See What So Terrified You (2003)

These photographic self-portraits by Carrie Mae Weems show the artist costumed in a dress that directly refers to the rich Southern African-American quilt-making tradition. The photos are from The Louisiana Project, Weems’s ambitious multi-part work that explores New Orleans’s history of social and racial hierarchies and codes. Weems’s dress—patterned on a Log Cabin design—expresses her identification with the region’s rich African-American heritage. She also intends her garment, an object stitched together from numerous pieces of cloth, to signify the city’s unique racial mixture.

Sound Suit (2009)

For his body of work entitled Sound Suits, Nick Cave draws on numerous sources such as carnival and Mardi Gras, traditional West African sculpture and ceremony, performance art, feminism, craft, and modern dance. Cave creates his wearable sculptures from such materials as buttons, twigs, leaves, handmade fabrics, sequins, and hair. The artist aims for his works to seem alive, to “recall the African positing of spiritual powers in objects.” He considers his work a catalyst for change and hopes that “the people who see it will be fueled by their experience with it.” The Sound Suit in this exhibition is embellished with materials such as crochet doilies and colorful buttons.

The exhibition “Pattern, Costume and Ornament” will remain in the Bohourfoush Gallery of the Birmingham Museum of Art through Septmember 12. Find information for visiting the Museum, including directions and hours, at www.artsbma.org.

About the Birmingham Museum of Art: Founded in 1951, the Birmingham Museum of Art has one of the finest collections in the Southeast. More than 24,000 objects displayed and housed within the Museum represent a rich panorama of cultures, including Asian, European, American, African, Pre-Columbian, and Native American. Highlights include the Museum’s collection of Asian art, Vietnamese ceramics, the Kress collection of Renaissance and Baroque paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts from the late 13th century to the 1750s, and the Museum’s world-renowned collection of Wedgwood, the largest outside of England.

Source: artfixdaily.com

The 2010 FIFA World Cup Art Auction

The art community is not left out of the spirit of this year’s World Cup. The 2010 Fine Art, an art auction that will be a visual celebration of the FIFA World Cup, will serve not only as a platform to celebrate Africa and African culture, but also other cultures of the world through contemporary art, as the World Cup berths on African soil for the first time in the 80-year history of the international tournament.

With 160 artists from the 32 countries participating in the mundial, the art auction will feature five Nigerian artists, including: Toyin Omolowo, Portus Ojomo, Toyin Loye, Osi Adu, and Ugochukwu Nzewi. They will, alongside other artists from other participating countries, give art collectors and football fans the opportunity to keep a piece of history as captured in their art. The art auction will be divided into two collections – 2010 International Fine Art; and 2010 African Fine Art. Works to be displayed by the Nigerians are: ‘The Keeper’ by Osi Audu; ‘FootballUniting the World’ by Toyin Omolowo; ‘Victory’ by Portus Ojomo; ‘Football is One World’ by Toyin Loye; and ‘Soccer Field’ by Ugochukwu Nzewi.

Toyin Omolowo noted that the essence of his painting, ‘Football Uniting the World’, was to express the development of modern civilisation. “Love, peace, and happiness are the thrilling messages to the people of the beautiful world through the game of soccer,” he said.

Omolowo’s painting depicts images of six FIFA continental zones characterised by a medley of colours representing the continents of Africa, Asia, Europe, North/Central America and Caribbean, Oceania, and South America.

“My work is also a vision of revitalisation, which has arrived in form of motif layers at the background indicating the bright side of African soil; as well as the round leather game called ‘Football’ that has fascinated the people and invariably becoming the cynosure of the world.”

Craig Mark, the Managing Director of 2010 Fine Arts, the official licensed products of the 2010 World Cup said, “The 2010 World Cup is an opportunity to bring the world to Africa and take Africa to the world – through Art. In addition to combining the creative talents of 160 of the world’s leading contemporary artists into one exceptional international collection, 2010 Fine Art also provides African artists with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to market their talents to international audiences through the platform of the 2010 FIFA World Cup.”

Toyin Omolowo, a multimedia visual artist, was born in Lagos. He studied Art at the Yaba College of Technology between 1984 and 1990. His art experience since 1990 covers painting, textile Art, graphics, and metal sculpture.

Toyin Loye was born in Ijebu Ijesa, Osun State, in 1959. He went to the School of Arts and Science, Ile Ife, before going to the University of Ife, present day Obafemi Awolowo University. His art is believed to be a modern representation of ancient African art tradition. His works have featured in Europe, Japan, and Africa. He currently resides in the Netherlands.

Born in Ile-Ife, Portus Ojomo relocated to Europe, where he studied in the Royal Academy of Arts in Antwerp, Belgium, obtaining a Bachelor of Arts degree. He later went on to study in Mexico and is referred to as an African monumental artist in Diaspora. He presently lives in Belgium.

Ugochukwu Nzewi was born in 1979 and studied Sculpture at the University of Nigeria Nsukka; he is a multi talented artist who expresses himself through sculpture, music and painting.

From each original work, 210 copies will be made in archival ink on cotton; with the number 210 being connected to the year 2010. The auction of the originals is scheduled for Johannesburg during the final games of the group stages.

Source: 234next.com
By Obidike Okafor

Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art

Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art presents the remarkable beauty of coiled basketry and demonstrates how the utilitarian rice fanner and market basket can be viewed simultaneously as objects of use, containers of memory, and works of art. Grass Roots features approximately 225 objects including baskets from the Lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia and from diverse regions of Africa, as well as African sculpture from the rice-growing societies which, through the agency of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, exported their cultures to America.

In this exhibition, running from June 23, 2010 - November 28, 2010 at the Museum for African Art, the humble but beautifully crafted coiled basket becomes a prism through which audiences will learn about the creativity and artistry characteristic of Africans in America from the 17th century to the present. Grass Roots traces the parallel histories of coiled baskets in Africa and America starting from the domestication of rice in Africa two millennia ago, through the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the Carolina rice plantation, to the present. Early examples of basketry from both Africa and the Americas show the striking similarity between the coiled baskets used to winnow and transport rice on both sides of the Atlantic. By following the trajectories of African and African-American baskets and their makers, the exhibition illuminates the origins and evolution of an ancient art in the global economy and interprets under-explored areas of American and African history. Paintings from the early 20th century, archival and contemporary photographs, and interpretive texts, show visitors how the coiled basket is a repository of history as well as an aesthetic object of beauty.



On both continents, as the original agrarian context for baskets disappeared, changing definitions of art and craft created new audiences for baskets; what was once a utilitarian object became a valued commodity and, in some cases, a magnificent work of art. In Georgia and South Carolina, as in south and western Africa, virtuoso basket makers now prize form over function; craftsmanship, sensitivity to materials, ingenuity of design, and seriousness of artistic intention have become important arbiters of value. Once fabricated to winnow rice and hold food, tools, and valuables, the coiled basket is admired today for containing and shaping space itself. There will be five short films that feature basket makers demonstrating their techniques and telling their stories. "The local community of basket makers, many of whom have made baskets that are in the exhibition, is proud to be involved with this project," said Thomasena Stokes-Marshall, Project director for the annual Sweetgrass Cultural Arts Festival held in Mount Pleasant, home of the original sweetgrass basket makers.



Grass Roots, organized by the Museum for African Art in New York in collaboration with the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture at the College of Charleston and the McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina, is curated by Enid Schildkrout and Dale Rosengarten with input from an advisory board of eminent social historians, art historians, anthropologists, and contemporary basket makers. A 272-page catalogue will accompany the exhibition, as well as a 30-minute film.

African Art: Beyond the Modernist Lens

Mask (mukudj), 20th c.
Punu peoples, Gabon
Wood, pigment, 10 1⁄2 x 5 1⁄2 x 9 1⁄2 inches
Gift of Bob Bronson, 1977.58.6

African Art
Beyond the Modernist Lens
August 14 - December 23
at the University of Virginia Art Museum

Derived from the Museum’s growing collection of African art, the exhibition African Art: Beyond the Modernist Lens examines the way African art is currently perceived and displayed in Western museum settings.

Once considered fetishes, African traditional sculptures were displayed in 20th century galleries, arranged alongside European and American products in a manner that emphasized their artistic qualities rather than their local meaning and use. The exhibition suggests that such early displays often influenced the collection of certain types of African objects, particularly those that appealed to Western notions of artistic elegance, abstract form, and exotic appearance. However, these standards had very little to do with African aesthetic values that are expressed in ritual and quotidian objects alike. African craftsman used these prescribed concepts of beauty and associated motifs to create objects that express both a

Museum Announces U.S. Tour of "Ife Art in Ancient Nigeria" Exhibition

The Museum for African Art, New York, has announced the U.S. tour of the important exhibition Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art in Ancient Nigeria. Devoted to the art of Ife, the ancient city-state of the Yoruba people of West Africa (in present-day southwestern Nigeria), Dynasty and Divinity has been co-organized by the Fundación Marcelino Botín and the Museum, in collaboration with the Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments. The exhibition (with the title Kingdom of Ife: Sculptures from West Africa) is on view through June 6, 2010, at the British Museum, London, where it has received widespread critical and public acclaim. Following its presentation there, it will travel to the U.S., opening at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, on September 19, 2010, and concluding its tour in November 2011 at the Museum for African Art, where it will be among the inaugural exhibitions in the Museum’s new building, which opens in April of that year.

Dynasty and Divinity features more than 100 extraordinary bronze, terra-cotta, and stone sculptures, ranging in date from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries, many of which have never been on display outside of Nigeria. All of the objects in the exhibition are on loan from the Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments.

Museum for African Art President Elsie McCabe Thompson states, “The selection brought together in Dynasty and Divinity is profoundly moving, both in its beauty and by the intense human emotions that motivated Ife artists. In addition, this is the first exhibition outside of Ife itself to focus exclusively on these remarkable works, and thus the first to offer a vivid portrait of the culture of this ancient Yoruba city-state. The exhibition reminds us that the legacy of Ife art extends far beyond the boundaries of Nigeria, continuing to inspire people and cultures across the globe. The Museum for African Art is thrilled to be working in partnership with the Fundación Marcelino Botín on this major project, and is delighted to continue the exhibition’s tour in the United States.”

Over the course of some four centuries, artists at Ife created sculpture that ranks among the most aesthetically striking and technically sophisticated in the world. Today, the city of Ife is still a spiritual heartland for the 29 million Yoruba people living in Nigeria and countless descendants in the Americas and elsewhere in the world. The present Ooni, or traditional ruler, of Ife, His Royal Majesty Alayeluwa Oba Okunade Sijuwade, Olabuse II, heads one of the longest surviving monarchies in the world. Some of the objects in the exhibition, including a copper mask said to represent the fourteenth-century ruler Obalufon II, were kept in the Ooni’s palace until the 1950s, when they were transferred to the Nigerian Department of Antiquities for purposes of conservation, study, and display. Dynasty and Divinity reveals the extraordinarily creative range of Ife art through a diversity of objects that includes handsome idealized portrait heads, exquisite miniatures, expressive caricatures of old age, monsters, lively animals, and sculptures showing the impressive regalia worn by Ife’s kings and queens. Together, these illuminate one of the world’s greatest art centers and demonstrate not only the technological sophistication of Ife artists, but also the rich aesthetic language they developed in order to convey cultural concerns.

The sculptures in the exhibition demonstrate the dignity and self-assurance readily associated with the idea of dynasty and the violence and misfortune that could befall human beings. Several superbly crafted copper alloy and terra-cotta heads and figures, for example, are expressive representations of the notion of authority, while startling representations of disease and deformity, rendered in stone and terra-cotta, show the afflictions that may result from both divine and worldly forces.

Among the exhibition’s many masterpieces are a group of life-size copper portrait heads, carved stone animals, and the spectacular seated male figure found in the town of Tada, Nigeria, shown dressed in an elaborate textile. Like many of the objects in the exhibition, the figure, dating from the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, was still part of a shrine in use in the early twentieth century. Two important bronzes from the Kingdom of Benin show the link between Ife and Benin, whose traditional ruler is thought to be descended from the royal Ife dynasty.

U.S. Tour Schedule
Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art in Ancient Nigeria opened at the Fundación Marcelino Botín, in Santander, Spain, in June 2009, and traveled to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid prior to its presentation at the British Museum. The exhibition’s U.S. tour is as follows:

• September 19, 2010 – January 9, 2011: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
• February 19 – May 22, 2011: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA
• July 10 – October 9, 2011: Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN
• November 11, 2011 – March 4, 2012: Museum for African Art, New York, NY

Source: artdaily.org

A Map of Art Practices in Africa, Past and Present Opens in Brussels

No fewer than 17 African countries celebrate 50 years of independence in 2010. To mark the occasion, BOZAR and the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren are organising the Visionary Africa festival, with concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance performances, a colloquium, and a literary festival. Anniversaries, of course, offer an ideal opportunity to look back and also to look ahead to what the future may bring. GEO-graphics. A Map of Art Practices in Africa , Past and Present, the keynote exhibition of the Visionary Africa festival, combines these two perspectives. In this exhibition ethnographic art enters into a visual and narrative dialogue with contemporary art, thereby offering a fine overview of the enormous wealth and diversity of the visual artistic creation on the continent.

A total of 220 ethnographic objects from Belgian private and museum collections span a period from the 16th to the 20th century. This extensive selection includes masks, fetish objects, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic sculpture, ceremonial objects, furniture, musical instruments, and more. One highlight is the paintings on glass, a typical folk art form from Senegal , with often naive pictures depicting religious subjects or scenes from daily life.

For the first time, these traditional works of art are looked at in relation to contemporary cultural life in Africa . Over the last ten years independent initiatives have emerged here and there on the continent. Eight of these centres for contemporary art have been invited to Brussels : Doual’art (Douala, Cameroon), La Rotonde des Arts (Abidjan, Ivory Coast), Centre for Contemporary Art Lagos (CCA Lagos) (Lagos, Nigeria), Centre for Contemporary Art East Africa Nairobi (CCAEA Nairobi) (Nairobi, Kenya), Picha (Lubumbashi, Congo), Darb 1718 (Cairo, Egypt), Appartement 22 (Rabat, Morocco), and Raw Material Company (Dakar, Senegal ). Each of these centres occupies a space within the exhibition, in which it presents its own artistic identity and shows work by "its" African artists. The selection includes a presentation of Pathy Tshindele’s commissioned work in the Congolese village of Makwacha , a video installation by the Ethiopian artist Theo Eshetu, paintings and sculptures from the collection of La Rotonde des Arts, and a probing series of photographs by George Osodi of the difficult living conditions in the oil-rich region around the Niger delta.

In addition, photographs on show throughout the exhibition present Africa 's extraordinarily diverse and proliferating urban landscape. This series of photographs is the result of ten years of research throughout Africa by David Adjaye, a world-renowned architect with Ghanaian roots who is also the artistic director of GEO-graphics.

The exhibition is organised thematically according to the continent's geographical zones: Sahel , mahgreb, desert, savannah, forest, and mountains/highlands. Adjaye argues that the natural environment influences cultural output, so that a shared culture reaches beyond national boundaries. Since 2007, however, Africa has seen unprecedented urban development, which is bringing with it major changes and raises fundamental questions about artistic creation. Each of the exhibition's geographical themes includes both ethnographic art, which mostly has a ritual basis and comes from the tribes in the countryside, and contemporary art that is being produced today in the cities. In this way, GEO-graphics links present and past and creates a bridge between city and countryside.

Although there are many different contemporary art scenes on the African continent, they clearly do not get enough support from government institutions and the world of politics. By inviting these eight arts centres to Brussels to show how they are creating a basis for cultural development on the African continent, the Visionary Africa festival hopes to initiate a debate on the "fragility" of Africa 's cultural institutions. To this end, an Atlas Room has been set up at the entrance to the exhibition; this information space presents in the form of timelines, texts and images, an overview of the national and international cultural policies, decisions and documents that reflect on the past, present and future of the cultural sector in Africa

The exhibition's artistic director, David Adjaye (born in 1966), is recognised as one of the greatest architects of his generation in the United Kingdom.

With his practice, Adjaye Associates, he has won various prestigious competitions and has established himself through numerous architectural projects, exhibition designs, and plans for temporary pavilions and private homes. The construction of arts centres and major public buildings in London , Oslo , and Denver are recent examples of Adjaye's strong interest in the integration of architecture into its existing surroundings. President Barack Obama recently asked him to design the future National Museum of Afro-American History and Culture in Washington.

Adjaye is organising this exhibition together with Anne-Marie Bouttiaux (head of the ethnographic department of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren), Koyo Kouoh (independent curator, "cultural producer" and director of Raw Material Company in Dakar), and Nicola Setari (director of the Visionary Africa festival). Its scenography has been entrusted to David Adjaye and the Belgian architecture practice SumResearch.

The Atlas Room is a research project conducted by writer and cultural historian Nana Oforiatta-Ayim and SumResearch.

The Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren is about to undergo major renovations. Over the next three years the Centre for Fine Arts will become a platform for the expertise of the museum. The two institutions will together carry out research into the contemporary presentation of ethnographic art and into how the ideal museum for African art might look. GEO-graphics is the first step in this project and marks the beginning of a long-term cooperative project.

Source: artdaily.org

Riveting Knysna exhibition by Simon Stone

SIMON STONE EXHIBITION (Knysna Fine Art Gallery until the end of June).

“IF you want to start a South African art collection, begin with Simon Stone,” said late artist and food critic Braam Kruger.

It is an assessment shared by Trent Read of Knysna Fine Art, where 10 of Stone’s paintings have recently gone on display.

The artist’s work is typically in large format and is oft times executed with an admixture of collage and brush work. His paintings give one pause for thought and if one of the attributes of good art is that it should make you stop and think, then the oeuvre of this artist is awash with plaudits.

Perhaps the most visually compelling of the works on display is a piece called simply Red Painting in which a surfeit of images are plastered on to a crimson background, such that the mind is torn hither and thither on a whirligig of presumption, contemplation and wonder. What does a portrait of a woman adorned in a chador have to with a full-length female nude stepping out of a shower cubicle? Are these multiple identities, the stark portrayal of the alter ego or an affirmation of the much quoted declaration that the female of the species is deadlier than the male? And what do footprints in a snowdrift have to do with cityscapes and images of the built environment? But that is part of what the painting is all about – to look and learn and consider. Each to their own and this is the substance of much of Stone’s art. One can make of it what one will. Crocodile Painting is equally enigmatic and the other paintings at the exhibition are just as riveting.

Source: www.weekendpost.co.za/
By Timothy Twidle

A Map of Art Practices in Africa, Past and Present Opens in Brussels

No fewer than 17 African countries celebrate 50 years of independence in 2010. To mark the occasion, BOZAR and the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren are organising the Visionary Africa festival, with concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance performances, a colloquium, and a literary festival. Anniversaries, of course, offer an ideal opportunity to look back and also to look ahead to what the future may bring. GEO-graphics. A Map of Art Practices in Africa , Past and Present, the keynote exhibition of the Visionary Africa festival, combines these two perspectives. In this exhibition ethnographic art enters into a visual and narrative dialogue with contemporary art, thereby offering a fine overview of the enormous wealth and diversity of the visual artistic creation on the continent.

A total of 220 ethnographic objects from Belgian private and museum collections span a period from the 16th to the 20th century. This extensive selection includes masks, fetish objects, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic sculpture, ceremonial objects, furniture, musical instruments, and more. One highlight is the paintings on glass, a typical folk art form from Senegal , with often naive pictures depicting religious subjects or scenes from daily life.

For the first time, these traditional works of art are looked at in relation to contemporary cultural life in Africa . Over the last ten years independent initiatives have emerged here and there on the continent. Eight of these centres for contemporary art have been invited to Brussels : Doual’art (Douala, Cameroon), La Rotonde des Arts (Abidjan, Ivory Coast), Centre for Contemporary Art Lagos (CCA Lagos) (Lagos, Nigeria), Centre for Contemporary Art East Africa Nairobi (CCAEA Nairobi) (Nairobi, Kenya), Picha (Lubumbashi, Congo), Darb 1718 (Cairo, Egypt), Appartement 22 (Rabat, Morocco), and Raw Material Company (Dakar, Senegal ). Each of these centres occupies a space within the exhibition, in which it presents its own artistic identity and shows work by "its" African artists. The selection includes a presentation of Pathy Tshindele’s commissioned work in the Congolese village of Makwacha , a video installation by the Ethiopian artist Theo Eshetu, paintings and sculptures from the collection of La Rotonde des Arts, and a probing series of photographs by George Osodi of the difficult living conditions in the oil-rich region around the Niger delta.

In addition, photographs on show throughout the exhibition present Africa 's extraordinarily diverse and proliferating urban landscape. This series of photographs is the result of ten years of research throughout Africa by David Adjaye, a world-renowned architect with Ghanaian roots who is also the artistic director of GEO-graphics.

The exhibition is organised thematically according to the continent's geographical zones: Sahel , mahgreb, desert, savannah, forest, and mountains/highlands. Adjaye argues that the natural environment influences cultural output, so that a shared culture reaches beyond national boundaries. Since 2007, however, Africa has seen unprecedented urban development, which is bringing with it major changes and raises fundamental questions about artistic creation. Each of the exhibition's geographical themes includes both ethnographic art, which mostly has a ritual basis and comes from the tribes in the countryside, and contemporary art that is being produced today in the cities. In this way, GEO-graphics links present and past and creates a bridge between city and countryside.

Although there are many different contemporary art scenes on the African continent, they clearly do not get enough support from government institutions and the world of politics. By inviting these eight arts centres to Brussels to show how they are creating a basis for cultural development on the African continent, the Visionary Africa festival hopes to initiate a debate on the "fragility" of Africa 's cultural institutions. To this end, an Atlas Room has been set up at the entrance to the exhibition; this information space presents in the form of timelines, texts and images, an overview of the national and international cultural policies, decisions and documents that reflect on the past, present and future of the cultural sector in Africa

The exhibition's artistic director, David Adjaye (born in 1966), is recognised as one of the greatest architects of his generation in the United Kingdom.

With his practice, Adjaye Associates, he has won various prestigious competitions and has established himself through numerous architectural projects, exhibition designs, and plans for temporary pavilions and private homes. The construction of arts centres and major public buildings in London , Oslo , and Denver are recent examples of Adjaye's strong interest in the integration of architecture into its existing surroundings. President Barack Obama recently asked him to design the future National Museum of Afro-American History and Culture in Washington.

Adjaye is organising this exhibition together with Anne-Marie Bouttiaux (head of the ethnographic department of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren), Koyo Kouoh (independent curator, "cultural producer" and director of Raw Material Company in Dakar), and Nicola Setari (director of the Visionary Africa festival). Its scenography has been entrusted to David Adjaye and the Belgian architecture practice SumResearch.

The Atlas Room is a research project conducted by writer and cultural historian Nana Oforiatta-Ayim and SumResearch.

The Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren is about to undergo major renovations. Over the next three years the Centre for Fine Arts will become a platform for the expertise of the museum. The two institutions will together carry out research into the contemporary presentation of ethnographic art and into how the ideal museum for African art might look. GEO-graphics is the first step in this project and marks the beginning of a long-term cooperative project.

Source: artdaily.org

It is the 61st Tribal Art Auction from Zemanek-Munster. Click here to visit the online catalog of lots.

FOCUS10 – intimate, relaxed and a lot of art!

After premiering in 2009 FOCUS is ready to launch its second edition. FOCUS10 is designed to present and connect the vibrant African art scene to the world. Conceived as a complement to Art Basel (June 16-20, 2010), the fair showcases Galerie Peter Herrmann (Berlin) and features emerging and established artists from Africa and the Diaspora in a show curated by Christine Eyene (London) and Lerato Bereng (Johannesburg) and supported by Fondation Blachère (Apt) and Pro Helvetia Cape Town. In a relaxed and intimate atmosphere visitors of FOCUS10 can expect to enjoy a huge variety of artistic production from the diverse scenes of the African continent and from the African Diaspora.

Galerie Peter Herrmann features acclaimed artists Dalila Dalleas (Louzla Darabi), Amouzou Glikpa, Bill Kouélany, Goddy Leye, Malam, George Osodi, Chéri Samba and Ransome Stanley. Founded in 1989 Galerie Peter Hermann ranks today among the best-established galleries representing art with an emphasis on Africa. Being involved in various projects and exhibitions in the past Peter Herrmann is renowned for his comprehensive support for both established artists and newcomers. The gallery enjoys worldwide recognition as being one of the few galleries to consistently and accurately present Africa over the course of an extended artistic timeline.

Peter Herrmann’s exhibition is complemented by a show of up-and-coming artists, who responded to the open call launched by FOCUS in 2009. Curators Christine Eyene and Lerato Bereng selected 12 artists whose topics, aesthetic approach, choice of medium and technique are innovative, reflect new trends stemming from Africa and the Diaspora, and whose practice is relevant within the context of Art Basel – the world’s leading art fair.

The curated show is supported by Fondation Blachère and Pro Helvetia Cape Town, both active partners of the creative African scenes. The Apt-based Fondation Blachère awards its Emerging Artist Prize at the Dak’Art Biennale and Bamako Encounters. It also hosts residencies and organises exhibitions. Fondation Blachère will contribute a selection of video pieces by various African artists to FOCUS10 whereas Pro Helvetia Cape Town will support the participation of Breeze Yoko (Johannesburg). Yoko will attend FOCUS10 as an observing artist and perform as a graffiti-artist in live-workshops as part of his forthcoming residency in Basel after FOCUS10.
Beside a unique visual experience, FOCUS10 is offering a variety of side events that will help the public to gain a deep insight into the various scenes of contemporary African art. In an intimate atmosphere artist talks, workshops, panel discussions and concerts will be held. As a fringe activity of FOCUS10 a work by Bill Kouelany and Goddy Leye named “Chocolate Banana” will be shown in a taxi driving around in the city of Basel.

In a global context where African galleries remain largely marginalized from mainstream art fairs, FOCUS10 will provide a critical platform for positioning African artists as players in the international art arena during the world’s most important art fair. The unique mixture of established institutions, independent artists and a wide range of supporting programs will undoubtedly turn FOCUS10 into an extraordinary experience and create an atmosphere of
encounter, exchange and creative reflection.

In its second edition FOCUS aims to further unveil the potential of the initiative and to take the next step in establishing itself as a key event on the calendars of galleries representing African artists, publishers, institutions and other cultural actors involved in the African art scenes.

For more details visit http://www.focus10.ch/.

Christie's African and Oceanic Art in Paris 6/15/10

To view the full catalogc of this auction, visit Christie's Online.

Oceanic & African Arts Sale at Webb’s

Webb's has been appointed by a US museum to manage the return of a significant collection of Maori, Australian Aboriginal and Oceanic pieces to the South Pacific region. Exceptional examples of sculpture, traditional dress and adornment, weaponry, ceremonial clubs, and other forms of indigenous art from Aotearoa and the broader Oceania area will be offered. The event also gives collectors the opportunity to consider a selection of African art of exceptional provenance from private Australasian, European and North American collections.

The viewing will be from June 11 through June 16, 2010. The auction itself on Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 4PM.

Lot 344a from the Sale:




Important Pou-Tokomanawa – Ancestral Totem - Architectural Element 
A highly prestigious form of ancestral carving, the pou-tokomanawa supported the central pole of the meeting house (pou-koukou-aro) at the base and signalled the delineation between entry and exit. As an ancestral totem, the pou-tokomanawa often represents celebrated traits of important leaders and thinkers. This pou-tokomanawa is carved with a firm muscular stance and an unflinching, confident, relaxed expression. Holding a patu in the right hand, denoting his knowledge of martial arts, and his left hand resting equally on the stomach. The torso is accentuated by its strong round shoulders and the simplicity of the form are both typical of the carving style of the North Island, east coast region. There is evidence of a piupiu having been previously attached. During the late 19th century, as Western sensibilities influenced concepts of social decorum and prestige, the addition of piupiu and cloaks to ancestral figures became increasingly common. The patina suggests significant age with remnants of early trade paint, heat damage and weather exposure evident. The base of the figure has deteriorated which is common given that this architectural form rested on the ground. The moko is prestigious with triple hae hae forms and complex rarua spirals evident on the upper and lower quarters of the nose and cheeks. The four extending forehead rays are also in triple haehae form. The stability of the wood is generally good, however the head, used to support the meeting house, carries a support cavity and is split. Later addition of mounting 19th century nails at the base still in place. Contemporary application of white paint to eyes. The Y registration form states that the object was found amongst the sand dunes of Gisborne during the 1950s and was then gifted to a member of the current owner’s family. H782mm W313mm. Y14046. 
$40,000 - $80,000

MTN New Contemporaries Arts Awards – bigger and better

The fifth MTN New Contemporaries Arts Awards are almost upon us. Held every two years, this prestigious competition identifies four emerging South African artists as the new stars of the South African art world, and elects a winner among them. This year, for the first time, this acclaimed event will take place in Durban, at the KZNSA Gallery.

One of the MTN SA Foundation’s most renowned projects, the MTN New Contemporaries Award is a competition designed to promote talented, cutting-edge artists who have not yet received critical acclaim but who are positioned to be the next leaders in the art field.

Says Eunice Maluleke; Head of MTN SA Foundation: “The MTN SA New Contemporaries Award affirms our responsibility to encourage creative thinking outside the business arena and allows the opportunity for young South Africans to be heard. These awards are also aimed at promoting young artists who have not yet had the opportunity for appropriate exposure.”

The 2010 artists who’ll be going up against each other this year promises to be an exciting line-up and a peek at some of their proposals suggests that we can look forward to a diverse exhibition that mixes traditional and new media within a contemporary context, and that might variously be described as critical, socially-engaged or ironic. As has almost become ‘de rigueur’ for the New Contemporaries, performance could find a role too.

The nominated artists are Donna Kukama; Kemang Wa Luhelere; Mohau Modisakeng and Stuart Bird.

Identifying the four artists for the MTN New Contemporaries Award is something of a curatorial mission. The process starts with a national research project, undertaken by an appointed young curator who is a specialist in contemporary art.

The practice of selecting the curator is in itself a lengthy process, managed by the Arts and Culture Portfolio of the MTN Foundation. The enterprise calls upon previous curators, judges and peers in the industry to nominate a talented individual with proven expertise in contemporary art curation, and who is likely to make the most substantial contribution to capacity-building in the field.

This year, the role fell to Nontobeko Ntombela. It is her vision, which will elaborate months of research of emerging artists in all nine provinces of South Africa that will give the exhibition, which will be held in September – Heritage Month – its definitive flavor and intellectual under-pinning. Ntombela’s comment about the exhibition was, ‘We can look forward to an exciting, fresh exhibition of cutting edge ideas dealing with current contemporaries ideas. The artists in the show complement yet contradict each other’s works through their use of medium and the concepts. This show will surely be a good reflection of the current contemporary practice in South Africa. Formulating an exhibition narrative in the presentation of work will be quite exciting.

The MTN New Contemporaries Award is distinctly different from conventional art competitions in South Africa as it is entirely unsolicited by the artists it honours. The competition also discards old stereotypes about art and foregrounds our artists as a source of new ideas and media.

“The concept of the MTN SA New Contemporaries Award contributes to the preservation of South Africa’s rich cultural and artistic heritage. Held every two years, this year is different in that it is the fifth year running meaning that we have had ten years invested in the emerging contemporary art field,” continues Eunice.

Who Knows Tomorrow in Berlin, Germany

Who Knows Tomorrow – this piece of worldly wisdom, heard everyday over large parts of Africa, provides the title for a remarkable project held by the National Gallery, for which it has invited five internationally acclaimed artists, whose work is primarily shaped by their African origins, to join together in creating a major exhibition in Berlin. Their works, completed and installed, for the most part, in prominent positions outside four of the National Gallery’s separate venues, will together serve to spark a dialogue over questions that are now more topical than ever before, thanks to the radical upheavals currently sweeping political, social and economic systems that had, until now, been considered unshakeable. These questions include: is uncertainty over the future now the greatest certainty we have today? Whose history needs to be told and faced up to now? What is art’s contribution to helping overcome (art) historical constructs, clichés and stereotypes?


Who Knows Tomorrow eschews the common practice of presenting artists in group exhibitions as representatives to speak for an entire continent. Instead, the participating artists reflect and interpret our own history and present us with their views of our culture, against the backdrop of four of the National Gallery’s iconic buildings, which themselves reflect German national identity at various points in the country’s past. The artists’ works bear the signs of historical complexities and ties between Africa and Europe and deal with aspects of the search for identity and globalisation, both of which have currently become extremely topical once again.

In the process, a clear link is established between the history of Africa’s colonisation and the situation in 19th century Berlin, then capital of the German Empire. While the question of national identity, so fiercely debated in and around Europe during this period, was hardly raised at all in colonised Africa at the time, it has now undergone a dramatic shift in today’s world.

The artists involved in the Who Knows Tomorrow exhibition frequently lay bare forgotten and overlooked cross-ties between Africa and Europe, as well as those that are being formed as we speak. Despite the fact that their works bear witness to a process of intercultural fusion, in which overlapping and mergence become a conceptual stylistic medium, a method, it would be wrong to assume that they merely reflect their own aesthetic history. They amount instead to an analysis of the history of art from a social perspective, over many epochs and cultures. By calling for the salvation of memory and making diversity into a principle, their works challenge us, their audience in the Western world, to reflect critically on ourselves and realign our relation to them.

The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive programme of events and a reader packed with insight from a multitude of perspectives.

Artists involved include: El Anatsui, Zarina Bhimji, António Ole, Yinka Shonibare MBE and Pascale Marthine Tayou. The exhibition will run through September, 2010.

For further information, visit the Official Website of the Exhibit.

Tribal Art in San Francisco Being Sold

The sale of some pieces of the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum's prized collection of tribal artwork from Papua New Guinea to settle a debt from the philanthropists who gave them to the museum has rekindled a bit of international tension.

Charles Abel, the tourism, arts and culture minister for that Pacific island nation, is to visit the museum Wednesday after penning a letter to John Buchanan, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, expressing concern about auctioning off parts of the collection.

At least 29 pieces that had been among the 398 on display at the city-owned de Young have been removed for sale by Sotheby's to pay a debt New York philanthropists John and Marcia Friede owe the auction house - part of a complicated legal tug-of-war that has involved a $30 million inheritance dispute and courts in Florida, California and New York.

Some of the items were put up for auction in May. Others are on the block June 16 in Paris. The government of Papau New Guinea lays claim to eight or nine objects in the collection and wants to make sure those pieces aren't among the ones to be sold.

"As far as our government is concerned, these objects have been illegally exported from Papua New Guinea and remain the property of our country but held in trust by the de Young Museum until further notice," Abel wrote in a May 4, 2010, letter to Buchanan.

Questions surfaced four years ago over whether some of the Friedes' compilation of about 4,000 pieces of artwork - named the Jolika Collection after the first letters of their children's names - are the national cultural property of Papua New Guinea.

Since then, that nation's government has said it's pleased the collection is intact and in the museum's hands for public display.

Buchanan said he's confident none of the items to be sold have been taken illegally from Papua New Guinea, saying Sotheby's wouldn't agree to auction items with questionable provenance.

De Young officials are looking forward to addressing Abel's concerns, said Susannah Stringam, a museum spokeswoman.

"Our response was, 'Come visit. Let's talk,' " she said. "It's going to be a friendly visit. It's not confrontational at all."

Source: The San Francisco Chronicle

By: John Cote

Jacaranda Tribal at Bruneaf 2010

Carefully Curated Ensembles of African & Oceanic Art to Be Offered at Sotheby's

On June 16 in Paris, Sotheby’s will offer one of the most carefully curated ensembles of African & Oceanic Art to be offered on the market in recent years. The works come from a number of esteemed private collections, including the famous Friede collection, and the sale is divided equally between Oceania and Africa. The objects have been selected based on their quality and rarity, reflecting the talent of the great artists of these two continents.

Oceanic Art
Following the tremendous success of the Rosenthal Collection in March 2010 in Paris, and the sales in Paris (5 December 2009) and New York (14 May 2010) the June 2010 auction pays tribute to the eye of John Friede and his work in promoting the recognition of the art of New Guinea and presents a rare sequence of Maori taonga from a number of private collections.

Twelve sculptures from the Marcia & John Friede Jolika Collection illustrate the archaic beauty and power of New Guinea art. Five of these objects were formerly on view at The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, de Young Museum, San Francisco from October 2005 through February 2010. A rare 15th –17th century Ewa figure, 3ft 6in. tall, is a superb illustration of the conceptual boldness and ethereal beauty of a tradition whose sculpture counts among the oldest known from New Guinea (lot 9, est. €300,000-500,000). This figure has been dated to between 1440 and 1650 by the C14 method. Also presented is a powerful male figure from the Lower Sepik, 28in. tall, amongst the most remarkable examples of the style which developed in the region (lot 13, est. €250,000-350,000). Its long curved nose, typical of the Kandimbong figures which portray the tribe’s mythical founder. The figure was photographed in the French art dealer, Pierre Loeb’s Paris apartment in 1929 and exhibited for the first time in 1930 at the Galerie Pigalle in an exhibition which reflected the growing enthusiasm of the Surrealists for the innovative sculpture from Melanesia.

Polynesian art is represented by a group of important and archaic Maori taonga (treasures), which reflect the wealth and variety of the traditional art of New Zealand. Highlights include a large ware canoe prow, 3ft 8in long (lot 21, est. €80,000-120,000), collected during the Korrigane expedition between 1934 and 1936, and an exquisitely refined rare nephrite ear pendant, 12in. long (lot 22, est. €8,000-12,000). The surrealist design and great rarity of the stone-carved intricate Maori carving, 11in. long, together with the mystery surrounding its use, make it one of the most sought-after expressions of Maori art (lot 23, est. €50,000-70,000). Many of these sculptures boast the most distinguished provenances, including Pitt Rivers, Webster, Beasley, La Korrigane, Epstein, Ratton, and Monzino.

African Art
A magnificent and rare Senufo equestrian figure (Ivory Coast), 11in. tall, was one of the highlights at the Resonances exhibition at the Basel Art Centre in January 1984, where it was displayed opposite Picasso’s Flute Player. By underlining the formal and aesthetic overlap between Tribal and Modern Art, this exhibition anticipated Primitivism in 20th Century Art at MoMA a few months later and the Bildweltung/Visual Encounters exhibition at the Beyeler Foundation in 2009. The figure evokes the power and dignity associated with equestrian figures amongst the Senufo, captured in forms that would profoundly influence modern art (lot 39, est. €80,000-120,000).

Amongst the discoveries revealed in the sale are two previously unknown Chokwe masterpieces (Angola) acquired in 1903 and 1905, and kept in the same European family ever since: a sceptre 16in. tall (lot 74, est. €70,000-100,000); and a finial from a sceptre-tobacco box, 6in. tall (lot 75, est. €80,000-120,000). These two exceptionally rare works are attributed to the Moxico School, whose 18th and 19th century court carvers produced the most powerful and refined works of Chokwe art.

The art of Central Africa features prominently, including a magnificent and rare Kuyu three-faced head (Democratic Republic of the Congo), height 14in., collected by Aristide Courtois before 1938 and then owned by Madeleine Rousseau, Hélène Kamer, and Daniel Cordier (lot 72, est. €200,000-300,000). This is one of the few known Kuyu three-faced heads. Only three other examples are documented – one in the British Museum, one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and another formerly in the Vérité collection. With exceptional talent the artist has made each face a unique expression of Kuyu ideals of strength and beauty.

A remarkable Hemba ancestor figure (D.R. Congo), 2ft 7in. tall, is one of the most remarkable pieces in the Niembo-Luika style, whose workshops produced the most prestigious works of Hemba art (lot 73, est. €350,000-500,000). The figure’s beauty and authority derive from its form and rhythm. The ancestor’s presence, underscored by the presence of cowry shells in the eye sockets, is very rare for the Hemba. To François Neyt, this masterly work dates from the first half of the 19th century – a period of intense cultural development, when the ancestor figure tradition was at its height.

Viewing
Friday 11 June 10am-6pm
Saturday 12 June 10am-6pm
Monday 14 June 10am-6pm
Tuesday 15 June 10am-6pm

Source: Art Daily