"The Global Africa Project" at the Museum of Arts and Design this fall

An unprecedented exhibition exploring the broad spectrum of contemporary African art, design, and craft worldwide, The Global Africa Project premieres at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) this November. Featuring the work of over 60 artists in Africa, Europe, Asia, the United States, and the Caribbean, The Global Africa Project surveys the rich pool of new talent emerging from the African continent and its influence on artists around the world. Through ceramics, basketry, textiles, jewelry, furniture, and fashion, as well as selective examples of architecture, photography, painting, and sculpture, the exhibition actively challenges conventional notions of a singular African aesthetic or identity, and reflects the integration of African art and design without making the usual distinctions between "professional" and "artisan."

On view from November 17, 2010, through May 15, 2011, The Global Africa Project is co-curated by Lowery Stokes Sims, the Museum's Charles Bronfman International Curator, and Leslie King-Hammond, Founding Director of the Center for Race and Culture at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Visitors and scholars can track the development of the project and participate in an online discussion of key issues related to exhibition through an interactive and behind-the-scenes blog on MAD's website.

"The Global Africa Project charts important new territory in the field by actively looking beyond restrictions of traditional art historical groupings, including medium, geography, and artistic genre," states Holly Hotchner, the Museum's Nanette L. Laitman Director. "By many measures, this exhibition is entirely unprecedented and it is a landmark moment in our history. As a museum that has long challenged the hierarchies separating art, craft, and design, we are delighted to introduce these new explorations of contemporary African art and aesthetics."

The exhibition will showcase a diverse group of creators, including artists who are experimenting with the fusion of contemporary practices and traditional materials, and design collectives that are using their creative output as engines of local economic change. Featured artists and designers range from well-known figures such as Yinka Shonibare, Kehinde Wiley, and Fred Wilson; to fashion designer Duro Olowu, who is an important presence in the London fashion scene, and Paris-based Togolese/Brazilian designer Kossi Aguessy, who has collaborated with Renault, Yves Saint Laurent, Cartier, and Swarovski; to the Gahaya Links Weaving Association, a collaborative of Hutu and Tutsi women working in traditional basketry techniques in Rwanda. The Global Africa Project will be accompanied at MAD by a special installation, Are You a Hybrid?, curated by designer Stephen Burks. Exploring the impact and influence of Africa on contemporary design, it will be on view from February through April 2011. The installation is part of the MADProjects exhibition series, which explores emerging trends and innovations in the design world.

“Given the nomadic, even migratory, nature of artistic careers today, the interesting challenges of presenting an exhibition like The Global Africa Project are indicated in its very title,” stated curator Lowery Stokes Sims. “The exhibition addresses important questions of how these designers, craftsmen, and artists grapple with issues of commodification in art production, and the meaning and value of art in contemporary society.” 

“No longer are these artists viewed as part of the periphery of the main stream art world," Leslie King-Hammond added. “This work redefines a new center of creativity and innovation for the twenty first century.” 

In order to present the various dimensions of the work of African artists and artisans worldwide, The Global Africa Project will be organized around several thematic ideas: the phenomenon of cultural fusion; promoting competition on the creative global scene; fostering the use of local materials; supporting artisans and craftsman; and impacting the economic and social condition of local communities. In addition to providing a broad framework for the exhibition’s organization, these themes will encourage The Global Africa Project’s audiences to discern how global African artists grapple with the commodification of art production and the meaning and value of art in society—an increasingly significant issue for nations in a rapidly changing global context.

Source: Museum of Arts and Design website

Image: "Sweet Grass Basket" by Mary A. Jackson (1999)

The University of Iowa Museum of Art presents Ere Ibeji: Yoruba Twin Figures from the Collection of J. Richard Simons

Opening Thursday September 2, 2010
On view through October in Iowa Memorial Union's Black Box Theater

Ere Ibeji: Yoruba Twin Figures from the Collection of J. Richard Simon features the extraordinary 300-piece twin figure collection of UI Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Industrial Engineering J. Richard Simon. In the Yoruba culture of southwest Nigeria, twins are believed to be spirited, unpredictable, fearless, and agents of good luck. However, there and elsewhere in Africa, twins suffer a high mortality rate. With fragile health, one or both twins may fail to survive and after death, the mother commissions a six-to-eight inch ere ibeji, or twin figure, to be cared for just as a family member for generations to come.

Professor Simon has been collecting ere ibeji for over two decades and currently has one of the largest collections in the world. He has generously promised his figures to the University of Iowa Museum of Art.

Two events will be held in conjunction with the exhibition: Christopher Roy's gallery talk on September 16 and a symposium, Images of Twins: ere ibeji of Nigeria's Yoruba people, on October 8. Participants include: Professor John Pemberton, Amherst College, Professor Marilyn Houlberg, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and George Chemeche, artist and collector, New York.

Ere Ibeji: Yoruba Twin Figures from the Collection of J. Richard Simon is curated by Christopher Roy, UI art history professor and Elizabeth M. Stanley, Faculty Fellow of African Art.

Source: University of Iowa Museum of Art

Gallery Dedicated to African Art Is Added to University of Memphis Art Museum

An inaugural exhibition, Art in the Land of Sundiata, is now on display at the redesigned gallery Africa: Visual Arts of a Continent at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis. The exhibition’s development, design, and installation were supported by gifts from anonymous donors as well as an award from the First Tennessee Foundation.

The AMUM collection in the newly reopened gallery features objects from five culture groups in Western Sudan: the Dogon, Bamana, Senufo, Marka, and Lobi. The art in this exhibition is a small part of the 2008 gift from Martha and Robert Fogelman that includes tradition-based objects representing several cultural groups of West and Central Africa.

The gallery will display examples of the culturally and visually varied field of African art while supporting a new graduate-level art history concentration in the arts of Africa and the African Diaspora.

The diversity of the collection will enable AMUM to host exhibitions that address major themes in African art and Africa’s visual culture, including the study of the continent’s traditional art and Africans’ encounters with the West and the influence on Africans of the Diaspora, the dispersion and modification of African cultures throughout and beyond the continent of Africa.

The study of African art encompasses a number of academic disciplines, including anthropology, art history, and the visual and performing arts of music, dance, and theater.

For more information, call Leslie Luebbers, director of AMUM, at 901-678-2224.

On African Safari, Off the Beaten Path in Kansas

THE story of Martin and Osa Johnson, an American couple whose documented journeys to places like Africa transformed them into national celebrities in the first part of the last century, has faded with time. Even in some parts of Kansas, where the couple grew up before setting off on their adventures, mention of the Johnsons can now draw looks of puzzlement.

But here in the rolling hills of southeastern Kansas, in the town where Osa Johnson grew up, their memory is alive and well. Inside an old train depot, the halls of the Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum are filled with photographs from their trips, copies of their books and the possessions they carried — film splicers, licenses to fly airplanes, a waffle iron, even Mrs. Johnson’s zebra skin shoes.

Occupying these halls, too, is the double challenge of a small museum off the beaten track: How to explain the significance of a once-famed couple to an audience now accustomed to glancing at African scenes with the click of a mouse; and how to do that from a town that sits about two hours from the nearest major city (Wichita, Kansas City and Tulsa, Okla., are each about the same distance away.)

The museum in Chanute, home to fewer than 10,000 residents, draws 5,000 or 6,000 visitors a year, said Conrad Froehlich, the director, who notes that small facilities, though often overlooked, actually make up the vast majority of the nation’s museums. “That’s peanuts compared to the Field Museum,” Mr. Froehlich said of attendance here, referring to the natural history museum in Chicago. “But for where we are, that’s not bad.”

The museum draws its share of Osa and Martin Johnson devotees from far and wide. But other visitors, Mr. Froehlich acknowledges, have never heard of them.

“Some people just see the sign and stop in, and you can watch those visitors getting excited as they learn about the Johnsons for the first time,” he said. “That reminds me why we’re here. What we’re doing is keeping their legacy alive.”

By the 1920s and 1930s, Martin and Osa Johnson were household names and faces — as famous in their era, according to one Johnson historian, as Michael Jackson. Their comings and goings made headlines and, in perhaps the modern measure of celebrity, Mrs. Johnson had a stalker.
They were ordinary Kansas kids, as museum officials put it, without wealthy backgrounds or lengthy educations. Martin Johnson, a lanky boy raised in Independence, Kan., not far from here, was expelled from school for a photography prank that made fun of the school principal, the museum notes, though the episode is not emphasized before the busloads of Kansas schoolchildren who travel here on field trips.

At a young age, Mr. Johnson yearned for adventure and managed to travel with Jack London on his 1907 voyage on the Snark. After marrying when Osa was 16 (another fact not emphasized for school groups), the pair set off on their exploits, spending years in Africa and the South Pacific and documenting the animals, people and scenes they saw in a series of films. Mr. Johnson captured the images. Mrs. Johnson, who was also a photographer and filmmaker, starred.

The films were successful. Tours and talks followed. So did books.

“They projected the ideal American couple, and they really debunked a great deal of the previous imagery of Africa at the time,” said Dr. Pascal James Imperato, dean of the school of public health at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center, who edited Mrs. Johnson’s final book, published after her death; co-wrote a biography of the Johnsons; and is an honorary trustee of the museum. “They made Africa a place of beauty and tranquillity that was accessible almost as if it were a backyard in Kansas.”

But in 1937, Mr. Johnson died in a commercial plane crash in the United States. Mrs. Johnson, whose 1940 autobiography, “I Married Adventure,” became a best seller, died in New York in 1953.

In the years that followed, some forgot about the Johnsons, whose films now seem dated. Some in new generations never heard of them. And travel — and travelogues — shifted, both in technology, style and reason for being.

The museum opened in 1961, thanks to contributions and efforts from Osa Johnson’s mother, Belle Leighty, who still lived in Chanute at the time. It has expanded to include objects of African art and an ethnographic collection of masks, tools and musical instruments. It also developed traveling exhibitions and moved to its current, more polished setting.

The museum’s 10,000 square feet (including a storage facility and space shared with a library) house a cozy theater and a gallery with statues of the Johnsons — Martin before his camera — at the center. The gallery guides the uninitiated through the Johnsons’ story, featuring childhood clothing and personal memorabilia and photographs from their trips.

Survival for any small nonprofit museum is hard, not least of all during a recession. With two full-time employees and one part-time worker, Mr. Froehlich said, the museum “stretches things as far as we can” to manage its $150,000-to-$200,000 annual budget. Since the 1970s, the museum has entered into licensing deals for the images of the Johnsons, a way to make ends meet.

But those efforts have picked up sharply in recent years, and a larger campaign is under way, according to a lawyer who has been hired to lead the museum’s licensing efforts. American Eagle Outfitters had a licensing agreement with the museum in connection with the retailer’s Martin + Osa stores. The stores, which American Eagle recently decided to close, used the museum archives for “design and lifestyle inspiration,” according to the clothing line. A Hollywood producer is developing a movie.

If that all sounds contrary to the academic work of a museum, Mr. Froehlich says that it is quite in keeping with the way the Johnsons themselves got by. Some view them as pioneers in the notion of product placement in film. They used items like Hershey candy bars and Bisquick in their movies and elsewhere in order to pay for the next adventure, he said.

In any case, Mr. Froehlich said, none of it clashes with the museum’s goal: “Introducing the Johnsons’ story and lives to a younger and more diverse group.”

Jacquelyn Borgeson, the museum’s curator, says she sees signs that their story is re-emerging. In different decades, different fields of study have focused in on the Johnsons, finding relevance in their work.

In the 1960s, she says, the Johnsons were rediscovered by conservationists. Then in the 1970s, anthropologists found them, followed by scholars of women’s studies in the 1980s and aviation specialists in the ’90s. During the last decade, those in the fashion world found Mrs. Johnson (who had her own clothing line and was once voted one of America’s best-dressed women).

“They’re slowly coming back, niche by niche,” she said. “It’s a slow process.”

Others, too, are finding them, perhaps accidentally along the quiet road through this town. On an afternoon this year, the halls were mostly empty, but for a few of the curious.

In a museum this size, there is time and space for visitors’ journals. A recent entry gushed, “Osa Johnson is a woman who knew how to live.”

Source: The New York Times
By: Monica Davey