L'Afrique au Quotidien : The Meynet Collection

In the year 2000, the Musée des Confluences in Lyon received an important donation of African objects on behalf of Michel and Denise Meynet, collectors driven by a passion to acquire objects which speak volumes about their cultures of origin. L'Afrique au quotidien, currently being presented by the MdC, invites visitors to experience the quality, diversity, and richness of an assemblage formed over the period of a decade. One of the foremost characteristics of the Meynet Collection is its focus on utilitarian objects––pieces which would normally be destroyed or discarded after a period of use. Animated by the desire to comprehend and exalt these objects, the Meynets have done their utmost to provide important documentation for most of the objects on display. L'Afrique au quotidien will be on view through March 3.

Incised gourd

Ethiopia

Headrest

Ethiopia

 

Beaded apron

Cameroon

Stool

Ghana

Images courtesy of the Musée des Confluences/P. Ageneau

African Art World Nestled in Tenafly

TENAFLY, N.J. — You can count the number of American public museums devoted entirely to African art on a few fingers.

There’s the National Museum of African Art in Washington. And the Museum for African Art in New York, reopening in a new Fifth Avenue home next spring. And there’s a third you’ve probably never heard of, the African Art Museum of the SMA Fathers here.

This museum is small and unorthodox in its setting: a stained-glass-windowed hall attached to a Roman Catholic church. But it’s the real African deal, with a collection covering the continent, top to bottom, coast to coast, old to new.

If you’re in New York City, you’ll have to cross the George Washington Bridge to find it. But if you’re looking for visual magic — a Yoruba dance mask with a mini-zoo on top; a brocaded body-wrap from Ivory Coast that seems to float on air; or a 10-foot-high figure of the 1960s Malian soccer hero Salif Keita dressed in team colors and cut from a single tree — you’ll have come to the right place.

And a pretty place it is, the leafy residential campus of a religious order called the Society of African Missions, but better known as the SMA Fathers, with the initials being the order’s name in Latin, Societatis Missionum ad Afros.

The order was founded in Lyon, France, in 1856 by Melchior de Marion Brésillac. A precocious young cleric, he was made a bishop at 29 and set up a network of missions in India before traveling to Africa to do the same. His time there was brief: six weeks after arriving, he died of yellow fever.

But his order was long-lived. It set down roots in present-day Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Liberia and Tanzania and maintained headquarters in Europe and the United States. The Tenafly seminary, which opened in 1921, was intended as a training center for African-American clergy. The racial politics of the time thwarted that plan, but two decades later, after an infusion of immigrant Irish priests, Tenafly became the SMA’s American home base.

Part of the order’s mandate was to embrace and preserve indigenous cultures. Among other things, this entailed acquiring art wherever it was found in Africa but also commissioning African artists to create new pieces based on Christian themes. One priest, Father Kevin Carroll (1920-1993), an anthropologist and photographer, requisitioned such work from some of the most celebrated Yoruba sculptors of the day.

During a century and a half, the SMA amassed some 50,000 items and built museums to hold them: two in France and one each in Italy and the Netherlands. The Tenafly branch, installed in its present setting in 1980, is now incorporated as a nonprofit institution technically independent of the order and has its own modest holdings of around 1,000 objects. Some came through missionaries, but many were donated by a generous group of local private collectors who have also backed a series of strong thematic exhibitions during the tenure of the museum’s director, Robert J. Koenig.

These donations account for much of what’s in the current show, the first of two year-long permanent-collection displays. They are defined by geography, one of several artificial categories used to package African art for consumption, others being tribes and traditions. But when you have holdings of limited examples of many different kinds of things, what other presentation can you use?

Anyway, geographic delineation is quite approximate here: “Guinea Coast and the Sudan” is really Chad to South Africa. The exhibition labels avoid hard-and-fast alignment of peoples, places and styles. And overarching themes, when introduced, are lightly applied. On the whole this is a show about object-by-object variety.

There are plenty of so-called classic sculptural types. Dan masks from Liberia have Valentine-heart faces exquisite and inscrutable enough to make sense on the streets of Goldoni’s 18th-century Venice. Equally familiar and enchanting are helmet masks carved for Mende women’s societies in Sierra Leone: petite of feature, high of forehead, demure of expression, each an ideal of feminine beauty.

Dogon dance masks depicting birds, antelopes, rabbits and people are the exact opposite of demure. With their paint-freckled surfaces, fiber wigs and movable parts, they’re a chorus of cawing, braying, snuffling, singing beings, visual art as visual noise. You can imagine what they would have looked like on costumed performers in constant motion, twirling, dipping and raising dust.

Baule sculptures of spirit-spouses, embodying the significant others each of us has in the metaphysical realm, are less kinetic in concept but warm up whatever space they’re in — originally the home where they were kept and petted and coddled. The museum has examples of spirit-spouse figures that, set side by side, seem worlds apart but together demonstrate how meaningless, in terms of valuation, distinctions between classical and contemporary can be.

One figure is traditional in appearance, upright, commandingly grave, nude except for a cotton loincloth. The other is a modern urbanite version of the same model but in this case a female figure dressed in shorts and flip-flops, her face fixed in a self-possessed stare. Is one a more authentically superior being than the other? No. They are both, like the towering statue of Salif Keita nearby, high-maintenance spiritual celebrities. In future relationships, they’ll be calling the shots.

As with most Western collections of art from Africa, the one here is made up primarily of wood sculpture. But is this the medium historically most favored in Africa itself?

We’ve come to think so only because we see more carved figures in museums than we do other sorts of things. So it’s nice to see some of those other sorts of things in this show.

There’s metalwork, in which the continent is unbelievably rich, including wrought-iron Yoruba diviner’s staffs fitted with circlets of celestial birds; ponderous silver belts that are the wearable sculptures of the nomadic Tuareg in Sudan; and Ghanaian brass gold-weights, matchbook-size, covered with intricate patterns.

And gold-weights, in turn, seem to have inspired design in another medium, textile weaving. All the brocade on the ethereal Ivory Coast body-wrap take the form of small patches of luminous patterning, no two patches alike. This fabulous textile is now, of course, behind glass, though at some point, decades ago, someone who had reason to feel proud must have worn it, taken it off, put it aside, perhaps tossed it across a bed like the elegant Senufo one in the show, or draped it over a stool, like the timeworn Mossi example in the same display case.

With those two items, we’re back to wood sculpture again, this time as furniture. But in Africa even furniture has a spiritual life: beds and stools absorb the essence of their owners’ souls. Keeping that in mind, the installation of African art in a hall beside a church in a seminary starts to make perfect pan-cultural sense. It certainly makes this museum like very few others.

Source: The New York Times

By: Holland Cotter

After French Restitution of Maori Heads, African Sacred Artifacts Next?

A mummified Maori warrior head at the Rouen museum, in France, finally returns home to New Zealand after more than 200 years. This unexpected decision also concerns 15 other heads in several museums across France. The issue was triggered by a bill that was originally passed by the French Senate in June 2009 and adopted Thursday, April 29, by the majority in the National Assembly. It came into effect on Tuesday. But could this new legislation revolutionize the landscape in what concerns the restitution of African cultural assets?

Eight years after the passage of a bill that saw the handing over of the remains of Saartje Baartman, a.k.a. the Hottentot Venus, to South Africa the adoption of a new French law by an overwhelming majority could encourage the debate on the restitution of cultural property.
Thursday, April 29, members of the National Assembly voted en masse to adopt a bill that seeks the return of 15 mummified Maori heads, dotted around several French museums, back to New Zealand.

Proposed by Catherine Morin-Desailly, centrist Senator of Rouen, the bill was accepted by the Senate last June (2009) without amendment, by all present.

And the solemn vote that took place Tuesday, May 4, marks a point of no return towards a final adoption of the bill, with 457 MPs in favor and a meager 8 against.

The decision comes as a total surprise, considering that a request for the return of one of the Maori heads, at the Rouen Museum, had been rejected by the French authorities some three years ago, after some enthusiasts argued that other collections could be affected.

But is this the end of the road for countries seeking the return of their cultural property?

Although uncertain, Abdoulaye Camara, former president of the Museum of African Art in Dakar believes that "it’s a huge leap forward. Before this law, European museums did not want to hear about restitution. Now they are beginning to consider it. This can set into motion the issue of restitution of African cultural property."

It is a complex bill that only concerns human remains for now. Human remains that some museum officials have said could have been products of murders perpetrated in the search for exotic collector items in Europe in the 18th and 19th Centuries.

But "can humans be considered a collector’s item?" Asks Mr. Camara. The answer is yes. And it is precisely on this point that this new legislation could be considered as being revolutionary.
It seeks to "reactivate" a procedure to downgrade public collections deemed "inalienable". The procedure is expected to allow for the return home of many human remains exhibited as exotic oddities, more often than not, within the confines of Western museums.

"The ordinary mind can hardly fathom how these human remains could have stayed without burial, and far from their homeland," says an outraged Abdoulaye Camara.

And the French National Assembly (Parliamentary) Relations Minister Henri de Raincourt agrees: "From a ritual showing the respect of a tribe and family toward their dead, the mummified heads became the object of a particularly barbaric trade due to the curiosity of travelers and European collectors".

This piece of law therefore answers an ethical question that has been ignored for a long time. These human remains, which on the one hand are regarded as collectors’ items or pieces of art by Western art enthusiasts, and sacred by their own people on the other hand, can finally enjoy their long overdue homecoming and burial.

The preserved Maori head in Rouen was offered by an individual in 1875. Several cities around Europe, including Geneva, Glasgow, Edinburgh, London and Copenhagen have already responded positively to New Zealand’s request for restitution.

Last year, The Netherlands gave back the head of King Badu Bonsu II, beheaded in the Gold Coast (now Ghana) 171 years ago by the Dutch, to Ghana. His head had been preserved in formalin and kept in the reserves of a medical center.

In 2002, France gave the body of Saartjie Baartman back to South Africa. After her death, the South African woman’s corpse was cast in plaster and dissected, nicknamed The Hottentot Venus and displayed at the Museum of Mankind (Musée de l’Homme) in Paris.

"There are some things which are above art and which should remain sacred," Catherine Morin-Desailly told the Associated Press.

Source: afrik.com

By: Alicia Koch, Patrick K. Johnsson

Exhibition of tribal art from India opens on note of controversy

Other Masters From India — Contemporary Creations of the Adivasis,' a stunning exhibition of contemporary tribal art from India opened on Monday at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris.

Conceived and curated by Jyotindra Jain, the former director of the Crafts Museum in New Delhi and one of India's foremost historians and chroniclers of tribal art, this exhibition is not just a visual and aesthetic treat; it has been put together diligently and intelligently, taking the viewer down the years, from the time when tribal art was ritualistic and iconographical, confined to the walls of Adivasi homes, to the present when art has enabled contemporary artists to give voice to their existential predicaments, thus transforming their artistic space.

Rare photographs

The entire credit for this exercise goes to Dr. Jain's scholarship, knowledge and aesthetic sensibility. Most of the writings and several rare photographs in the detailed and richly illustrated catalogue have been contributed by him. However, the exhibition has been marred by the fact that Dr. Jain, who spent three years working on this project, has not been given adequate credit for his contribution.

The exhibition begins by examining, with some fine old prints and photographs as well as video footage from Bombay masala films, the representation of the Adivasis over time. British colonial times, when anthropologists working on theories of race measured, recorded and photographed tribals as belonging to certain “racial” types, gave way to the calendar art of the 1950s and 1960s and the caricatural depiction of the tribal by Bollywood.

Section Two entitled ‘The People' presents Adivasi populations in a non-linear manner, each one of them being characterised by its material, ritualistic and artistic productions. Gigantic Bhuta sculptures from Karnataka, made of jackfruit wood and used in ancestor worship or appeasement have been brought all the way from the Crafts Museum in New Delhi. “Some of these pieces are about 150 years old and no museum outside India has a piece of this kind,” Dr. Jain told The Hindu in an exclusive guided tour of the exhibits.

There are objects here of incredible beauty, grace, colour and cultural and religious significance: Magical healing amulets from the Nicobar Islands, votive terracotta figures from the Ayyanar tribe in Tamil Nadu, bronze figurines from Bastar (Gond) and Orissa (Kondh), clay storytelling sculptures from Sarguja in Chhattisgarh, votive tablets from Rajasthan, paintings from the Rathwa tribe in Gujarat or the jadupatua scrolls from the Santhal tribes of Bihar or West Bengal.

Contemporary artists

But the most interesting section of the exhibition is the third one, which concentrates on contemporary artists and offers visitor a series of popular paintings with a special emphasis on two remarkable artists, Jivya Shoma Mashe of the Warli tibe in Maharashtra and Jangarh Singh Shyam, a Gond from Madhya Pradesh who tragically killed himself while working as a artist in residence in Japan in 2001.

This section is visually extremely gratifying in the most contemporary “artistic” sense, where tribal art steps out of the confines of the purely ritualistic to give voice to concerns such as urban encroachment, violence practised by the state, and the influence of modern technology. In one of the Santhal scrolls, Yama, the God of death, is shown wearing a policeman's uniform, a telling comment on how the guardians of the law are perceived by a largely disenfranchised and oppressed population. Trains, airplanes (which are part mechanical, part mythical creature) telephones, mirrors, thus mingle with harvests, fields and creatures of the forest, sometimes, as in the case of a train, completing cutting the artistic space in two.

Unfortunately, the museum has failed to fully recognise Dr. Jain's work. Despite assurances given by the museum, the erratum sheet detailing the missing credits is not an integral part of the catalogue. A belated loose leaf insertion in no way corrects the error, for once an exhibition has been dismantled, the curator has only the catalogue to show for his pains.

When questioned by this correspondent, Helene Fulgence, director of exhibitions, said that in the French system, when writers of “notes” were not identified, the work was automatically presumed to be that of the overall director of the exhibition, its curator. However, she suggested Dr. Jain could have been let down or “betrayed” by his assistant, Vikas Harish.

Mr. Harish placed the blame firmly on the Quai Branly Museum: “I am not responsible for the errors. I kept Dr. Jain fully informed. I was not in charge of the publication of the catalogue.”
As the blame game continued, with a senior museum official very rudely ticking this reporter off for “giving out the wrong message,” Ms. Fulgence confirmed that Dr. Jain had not been shown a PDF version of the catalogue for his approval. She told The Hindu that had the museum honoured its commitments to Dr. Jain, it would not have been able to bring out the catalogue in time for the “official inauguration” on Monday. The exhibition opens for the public on Tuesday.

Source: The Hindi
By: Vaiju Naravane