Shaping Power: Luba Masterworks from the Royal Museum for Central Africa

A new exhibition on Congolese tribal art opened this week at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Shaping Power: Luba Masterworks from the Royal Museum for Central Africa brings together twenty-six transfixing pieces of Luba art on loan from RMCA in Belgium, including masks, figural works, and a range of ritual and court art. 

Visit the exhibition's official website.

Memory board, lukasa

Mask  -  19th century

Caryatid stool  -  19th century

Figurative pipe  -  19th century

Bowl-bearer  -  19th century

Images courtesy of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Children of the Plumed Serpent at LACMA

Recent scholarship demonstrates that a confederacy of city-states in southern Mexico, largely dominated by Nahua, Mixtec, and Zapotec nobility, successfully resisted both Aztec and Spanish subjugation. Children of the Plumed Serpent: The Legacy of Quetzalcoatl in Ancient Mexico explores the extraordinary wonders in fresco, codices, polychrome ceramics, gold, turquoise, shell, textiles, and other precious materials that were produced by these confederacies between AD 1200 and 1500, as their influence spread throughout Mesoamerica by means of vast networks of trade and exchange. A ruling class of nobles, or caciques, believing that Quetzalcoatl, the human incarnation of the Plumed Serpent, had founded their royal lineages, called themselves the "Children of the Plumed Serpent"; they resurrected themselves and continued to affect cultural development in Mesoamerica during a dramatic period of social transformation.  On view April 1–July 1, 2012.

View the LACMA website.

Pendant Depicting a Ruler in Ritual Regalia  -  Culture unknown  -  AD 1200–1521

Detail of the Codex Selden  -  Mexico  -  AD 1556–60

 

Images and text courtesy of Los Angeles County Museum of Art

LACMA appoints curator to guide new African art program

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has named Dr. Mary (Polly) Nooter Roberts Consulting Curator of African Art to help launch a program and establish a gallery dedicated to the arts of Africa. Dr. Roberts is Professor of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA, and was Senior Curator of the Museum for African Art in New York from 1984–1994 and Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Fowler Museum at UCLA from 1999-2008.

The goal of Dr. Roberts’s appointment is to bring greater visibility to African arts in Southern California while creating programmatic linkages between LACMA and UCLA. As LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director Michael Govan states, “We have looked forward to launching a program for African art for several years and the timing seems right. We are excited to work with Polly Nooter Roberts as we explore new ways of understanding and presenting the richness of African artistic expression.”

LACMA’s growing collection of African art is diverse in form, material, and purpose. Works include masks and figures of wood and ivory, metalwork, textiles, beaded crowns, stools, and body adornments. Notable in the collection are a bronze plaque depicting a seventeenth-century official of the Benin Kingdom; a boli figure from Mali; and a selection of works from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Courtesy of ArtDaily.org and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art