African and Oceanic Art at Sotheby's - June 12, 2012

Sotheby's will put an exquisite group of African and Oceanic art and artifacts before the bidders in Paris on June 12. Highlights of the sale will include a stunning black Bete mask, a Fang reliquary figure, a cephalomorphic Igala head crest, a Yoruba Oshe Shango maternity figure, and a range of other sculptural masterworks from West and Central Africa, New Ireland, and elsewhere.

View the online catalogue.

Mask  -  Bete, Côte d'Ivoire

Reliquary figure  -  Fang, Gabon

Head crest  -  Igala, Nigeria

Oshe Shango maternity figure  -  Yoruba, Nigeria

Ivory cup with figurines  -  Sapi-Portuguese, Sierra Leone

Mask  -  Gere, Côte d'Ivoire

Power figure  -  Kongo, D.R. Congo

Female figure  -  Tiv, Nigeria

Malanggan mask  -  New Ireland

Canoe prow ornament  -  Solomon Islands

Information and images courtesy of Sotheby's

Winter Sale at Sotheby's

Sotheby's Paris will present its winter tribal art auction on Wednesday, December 14. Featuring a wide array of outstanding works from Africa and Oceania, the sale should generate its most intense bidding around a number of gorgeous and uncommon objects from West and Central Africa. Among the auction's most anticipated offerings will be a pair of fascinating Yoruba/Nago figural groups; an impressive anthropomorphic Dan spoon; a Bangwa power figure with numerous charge niches; a compelling and unusual Lega ivory statuette; and a beautifully rendered Luluwa bust.

View the online catalogue at the official Sotheby's website.

"Ife Art in Ancient Nigeria" Begins at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Exhibition Reminder!!

The critically acclaimed exhibition Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art in Ancient Nigeria begins its four-venue U.S. tour at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, on September 19, 2010. The exhibition was most recently at the British Museum, London, where the work was hailed as "humanely observed and crafted with genius" and as the kind of art "whose greatness pre-exists and survives us." (The Guardian)

The exhibition has been co-organized by the Museum for African Art, New York City, and the Fundación Marcelino Botín, Satander, Spain, in collaboration with the Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments.

Schedule:

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, September 19, 2010 - January 9, 2011

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, February 12 - May 22, 2011

Indianapolis Museum of Art, July 8 - October 9, 2011

Museum for African Art, New York City, November 11, 2011 - March 4, 2012

Exhibition:

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 features more than 100 extraordinary brass, terra-cotta, and stone sculptures, ranging in date from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries. Many of the works have never before been on display outside Nigeria.

Through a great diversity of objects, the exhibition reveals the remarkably creative range of Ife art. Included are handsome idealized portrait heads, exquisite miniatures, expressive caricatures of old age, 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 their rich aesthetic language.

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

Dallas Museum of Art Opens African Masks: The Art of Disguise

DALLAS - The Dallas Museum of Art will present a significant look at African visual culture through African Masks: The Art of Disguise, a new exhibition of approximately seventy works of art exploring the highly developed and enduring art of the African mask and revealing their timeless beauty, function, and meaning. Centered on the DMA’s distinguished collection of African art, acclaimed as one of the top five of its kind in the United States and which has set precedents since its inception 40 years ago, African Masks: The Art of Disguise features several works of art from the Museum’s collection that will be displayed for the first time. Significant works from other museum and private collections are also included in the exhibition.

African masks serve as supports for the spirit of deities, ancestors and culture heroes, which may be personified as human or animal, or a composite. Masked performances, held on the occasions of thanksgiving celebrations, rites of passage and funerals, often entertain while they teach moral lessons. In African Masks: The Art of Disguise, a variety of masks from sub-Saharan Africa offers a range of types, styles, sizes and materials and the contexts in which they appear. Carved wooden masks will be featured along with masks made of other materials including textiles, animal skin and beads. Because the mask is frequently only one part of an ensemble, full masquerade costumes will also be displayed, and the masks will “come to life” in performances recorded on film and in contextual photographs.

On view August 22, 2010 through February 13, 2011 in Chilton Gallery I, African Masks will be accompanied by an all-new smARTphone tour highlighting 19 masks in the exhibition and a visit “behind-the-scenes.” Visitors will be encouraged to view 10 additional masks in the Museum’s Arts of Africa galleries on the third level; they are among the 150 objects from the collection that are currently on view at the DMA.

“Our extraordinary African art collection is a particular point of strength and pride for the Museum, and with African Masks: The Art of Disguise, we take an in-depth look at the collection and present an innovative new way of looking at it,” said Bonnie Pitman, The Eugene McDermott Director of the Dallas Museum of Art. “Through the use of the smARTphone tour, which includes cultural information, videos and behind-the-scenes interviews, along with more information about the works of art, this exhibition offers the visitor a dynamic experience.”

“Connoisseurs of African art and tourists collect masks, preferably carved wooden ones. Africans consider the entire masquerade—the object that conceals the head and the costume that covers the body—to be the “mask.” The person within this ensemble is also part of the mask! This exhibition celebrates the art of both the sculptor and the costume maker,” said Roslyn A. Walker, Senior Curator of the The Arts of Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific and The Margaret McDermott Curator of African Art at the Dallas Museum of Art and the exhibition curator. “The African masquerade is a multimedia interactive experience that involves not only the sculptor but also the costume makers, dancers, musicians, spirits and audience.”

African Masks is divided into four sections and includes these highlighted works of art:

Masquerades are multimedia events that often include not one but several masked dancers embodying various spirits. On display for the first time is Chihongo face mask from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola: Chokwe peoples, made of wood, basketry, fiber, feathers, tukula, kaolin and iron; and Egungun costume from the Republic of Benin (former Dahomey): Yoruba peoples, made of cloth, appliqué, wood, cowrie shells, glass beads, animal claw or beak, sequins, animal fur and animal hide, and vinyl.

Human Disguises, including Four-face helmet mask (ñgontang) from Gabon: Fang peoples, made of wood and paint; and Forehead mask (mbuya type) from the Democratic Republic of the Congo: Central Pende peoples, made of wood, pigment and raffia fiber.

Composite Disguises, featuring a Water spirit helmet mask (Obukele) from Nigeria, Delta area: Abua peoples, made of wood, pigment and paint; and Mask (kifwebe) from the Democratic Republic of the Congo: Songye peoples, made of paint, fiber, cane and gut.

Animal Disguises, including Mask (gye) from the Côte d’Ivoire: Guro peoples, made of wood, paint and sheet metal; and Elephant mask (mbap mteng) from Cameroon: village of Banjoun (?), Bamileke peoples, made of palm-leaf fiber textile, cotton textile, glass beads and palm-leaf ribs
Two other masks that have never been on display before include Face mask (gle or ga),Dan peoples, Côte d’Ivoire or Liberia, made of wood, fiber and pigment; and Helmet mask (Lipiko), Makonde peoples, Tanzania, made of wood, beeswax, human hair and pigment.

Visitors will be able to explore and experience the exhibition with moving footage sound, and a smARTphone tour featuring Dr. Walker, Exhibition Designer Alan Knezevich, art collectors and performers, as well as a mask and animal connection featuring animals from the Dallas Zoo. The tour can be accessed by visitors on Wi-Fi–enabled smartphones and media players at DallasMuseumofArt.mobile.

African Masks is organized by the Dallas Museum of Art and curated by Roslyn A. Walker, Senior Curator, The Arts of Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific and The Margaret McDermott Curator of African Art at the Dallas Museum of Art. Dr. Walker is also the author of the newly published book The Arts of Africa at the Dallas Museum of Art, the first catalogue dedicated to exploring the Museum’s collection of nearly 2,000 objects—acclaimed as one of the top five of its kind in the United States. Commemorating the 40th anniversary of the collection, which began with a gift of more than 200 objects from DMA benefactors Eugene and Margaret McDermott, the catalogue draws from both historical sources and contemporary research to examine over 100 figures, masks and other works of art that represent 52 cultures, from Morocco to South Africa.

Source: Dallas Museum of Art

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

Nigeria's art collectors: A niche new market

In a suburb of Lagos, Nigeria's business capital, Yemisi Shyllon lives in a house full of bronze statues of African tribal rulers and brightly colored beadwork landscapes. He may be Nigeria's biggest art collector, with some 6,000 pieces by his count. "I don't go out much," he says, "I have enough to look at here."

Mr. Shyllon, who runs an engineering company, is one of a small circle of Nigerian businessmen who own huge collections of local art. Sammy Olagbaju, a 70-year-old retired stockbroker who has lived in London and New York, is another avid collector. One Lagos-based banker has over 600 pieces.

With 250 ethnic groups and around 150 million people, Africa's most populous country has many sources of artistic inspiration. A number of artists from western Nigeria use the bright colors and beadwork of the Yoruba, south-east sometimes look to their region's uli style, with simpler drawings on walls or pots.

The collectors say their government cares little about preserving this artistic heritage. They share the cynicism of many Nigerians, who think the politicians are more eager to grab a share of the revenues of sub-Saharan Africa's biggest oil producer. Instead, the collectors prefer to put their own money into gathering and cataloguing thousands of works of art. "For me, this is a philanthropic act," says Mr. Olagbaju, who notes that Nigeria's top public galleries struggle with power cuts that leave masterpieces gathering dust in the dark.

More recently, these collectors have realized that they have also been canny investors. Their hobby has started to attract foreign attention - and cash. At an auction of African art in New York in March, the five most expensive lots were Nigerian. A painting by the late Ben Enwonwu went for $91,000.

Some buyers are speculating that the Nigerian works are still undervalued. Giles Peppiatt, director of contemporary African art at Bonhams, a British auction house that hosted the New York sale, says prices will rise in this niche market.

Auctions are also happening in Lagos, where oil and banking have made a few very rich, though most people still live in grinding poverty. "There's a lot of money in Nigeria," says Mr. Peppiatt. "And though it might sound cynical, money and art are inextricably linked."

Source: The Economist Online