African Arts is devoted to the study and discussion of traditional, contemporary, and popular African arts and expressive cultures. Since 1967, African Arts readers have enjoyed high-quality visual depictions, cutting-edge explorations of theory and practice, and critical dialogue. Each issue features a core of peer-reviewed scholarly articles concerning the world"s second largest continent and its diasporas, and provides a host of resources - book and museum exhibition reviews, exhibition previews, features on collections, artist portfolios, dialogue and editorial columns. The journal promotes investigation of the connections between the arts and anthropology, history, language, literature, politics, religion, and sociology.

African Arts is dedicated to the study and discussion of traditional, contemporary, and popular African arts and expressive cultures. Since 1967, readers of African Arts have enjoyed high-quality visual representations, cutting-edge explorations of theory and practice, and critical dialogues. Each issue features a core of peer-reviewed scholarly articles concerning the world’s second-largest continent and its diasporas, and provides a wealth of resources including book and museum exhibition reviews, exhibition previews, features on collections, artist portfolios, dialogues, and editorial columns. The journal promotes the investigation of connections between the arts and anthropology, history, language, literature, politics, religion, and sociology.

《African Arts》期刊致力于研究和讨论传统、当代及流行的非洲艺术和表现文化。自1967年以来，《African Arts》的读者享受到了高质量的视觉呈现、前沿的理论与实践探索以及批判性的对话。每期都包含一系列经过同行评审的学术文章，涉及世界第二大洲及其侨民，并提供丰富的资源，包括书籍和博物馆展览评论、展览预告、收藏特写、艺术家档案、对话和社论专栏。该期刊促进了艺术与人类学、历史、语言、文学、政治、宗教和社会学之间联系的研究。

African Arts

What is the place of the street in the production and consumption of contemporary and commodified African festival? How has the street become a curatorial platform and a contested space through which visuality, cultural aesthetic and commodification, play, vulgarity, and the secular coalesce and tangle in an attempt to create a composite festival that produces different layers of historical, cultural, and visual analysis? (Fig. 1). To answer these questions, we need to briefly look at how the street has been theorized by scholars in the social sciences. The street has been defined as being “both contradictory and complex… distinctive but contested social space” as well as a space for public engagement and community-making (Hubbard and Lyon 2018). Others see the street as venue of governmental surveillance, secular power demonstration, class categorization, and legal systematization (Coleman and Sim 2000). The plasticity of defining the street is multifaceted, yet it overlaps its cultural and visual functionality.In this essay, I read Calabar Festival and carnival and the street as cultural theater through the which performance, play, and visuality are exhibited. Using photographs as my tool of analysis and historical resource, I conceptualize the street as a space of convergence where culture, visuality, creativity, economy, the secular, and the vulgar meet and entangle, creating changes, rhythms, and movements in cultural, political, leisure, and visual aesthetics1 (Fig. 2). While the social life of the street is complex, fluid, and seemingly boundless, its cultural, performance, play, and visual agency seems to diminish and invert the uncanny and domineering “political, legal, and economic forces that reinforce existing social hierarchies and patterns of exclusion” (Barker 2009) (Fig. 3).The Calabar Festival and Carnival is a thirty-one to thirty-two day yearly event that started in 2004/2005. The event takes place on the streets of Calabar, while certain aspects of the events are hosted at city centers like Calabar Stadium, Eleven-Eleven arena, Calabar Cultural Centre, and the Calabar Municipal Local Government ground, where the popular Carnival Village Market is positioned. In 2004/2005, the carnival was originally dubbed “Calabar Carnival Extravaganza” by the organizers, where a few “paradelike walk-about” revelers displayed symbols of different tourism sites and other forms and symbols of government projects with very sparse costuming (Carlson 2010: 47). Performances are orchestrated by different groups from the Cross River Regions and different national and international groups, while other contemporary entertainment events and popular performances are prospective features of the event at different gravity each year (Fig. 4).The festival/carnival dominantly clones the Caribbean carnival genre, with close parallels in performance, costuming, props, colors, floats, and other forms of cultural technicalities. The festival, which was originally built around an existing cultural tradition and performance of Efik people known as mbre ukabare-isua (the popular Christmas celebrations in the Cross River region), has shifted its performance and aesthetic ideals towards the Caribbean carnival genre in an attempt to remake an elaborate modernized and hybridized festival that is now scampering for international recognition and patronage (Figs. 5–6).Here, I position myself as a “visual griot” (as both a producer and an archivist).2 I attempted to document a history of contemporary Calabar Carnival in a visual form (Keller 2008). In this photo essay, I draw from my photographic archive of over a thousand photographs produced in 2019 during fieldwork in Calabar. Calabar is a typical Nigerian city in Cross River State. While rich in cultural antecedents and cosmopolitanism, Calabar is paradoxically a cultural terrain that is known for its social, economic, and political instability and that is larded with corruption, particularly in relation to investigating government-sponsored events (Fig. 7).My focus in this photo essay is primarily Calabar Carnival, one core component of the elaborate thirty-one to thirty-two day Calabar Festival and Carnival. I consider how Calabar Carnival, and the street, have become contested landscapes where performative visual technologies engage with social, cultural, and political entanglements. This essay shows how the street has become an important component in the making of history, in the creation, performance, and consumption of culture, and in curating and advancing visual practices, performances, and technologies. I consider how photography functions as making “raw history” (Edwards 2001: 5), creating documents of a carnival of culture (Fig. 8). However, the visual documentation of carnival by both local and international media networks like Multichoice/DSTV, professional photographers, amateur “vernacular photographers,” revelers, visitors, and residents as well as researchers like myself is so prolific that we can also experience the event as a “carnival of photos” (Figs. 9–10). The street functions as a respatialized landscape through which culture is intensely visualized and visuality is performed, curated, and exhibited, and through which revelers, tourists, and participants experience an “aura of authenticity” (Couldry 2005: 66-67) in relation to carnival participation and a modernized cultural engagement (Fig. 11). Multiple photographic technologies, including aerial photography and the production of the larger festival landscape through the use of drone photography, are exhibited (Fig. 12). Still and moving images produced through developing technologies have been broadcast across several online platforms. This virtual repository and circulation of images stimulates viewers additionally through live feeds, social media platforms, and television production. Social media repositories have become virtual sites for the circulation of carnival images in real time, thus extending carnival performance, participation, and animation beyond its real time and beyond the cultural spatiality of the street.The visual landscape of carnival is laced with vibrant aesthetic and performative scenes that are well suited for photography. Intermittent shutter sounds and flashes flicker within each second. Hands popping out from the crowd and focusing phone cameras on certain picturesque targets are very common. Cameramen representing different media institutions stand amidst masqueraders, performers, and spectators with their tripods ready to “shoot” and to record carnival videos. These images and videos are either posted in real-time transmission or are used at a later stage on several social media handles. Commercial street photographers also position their mobile studios at the margins of the streets and cultural arenas in search of patrons who want a document of the day and the people they shared it with. The images and videos produced during these events also jostle for dominance, relevance, and patronage on virtual platforms, commercial branding, and on several print media outlets (Figs. 13–14).In this era of image proliferation, visual craze, and digitization represented by the abundance of sophisticated digital cameras, camera phones, and virtual storage applications, the boundaries of visuality have been loosened, with frequent obstacles overcome in the context of photographic technology, image production and manipulation, virtual participation, digital storage application, and seamless, immediate, and uncontrollable circulation of images along internet networks. Leslie Witz argues that cultural productivities like performance, dance, floats, masquerades, touristic spectacles, as well as the visuals produced during festivals, are by themselves “domains of historical representation” which can “articulate with each other” to offer analytical landscapes for the “production of history” (Witz 2003: 7) (Fig. 15).In this sense, and particularly in Calabar Carnival, the street becomes the curatorial stage for the interplay between cultural authenticity and invention, as well as between the secular and the vulgar. Carnival, and by extension the street, has become an arena for sociocultural and political entanglement, a site for differentiated sociocultural contestations, politicoeconomic engagements, a space for international cultural diplomacy, and a landscape for performative visual technologies and a different form of curatorial practices (Fig. 16).I consider how the street has also been a contested space where the “displays of excess and grotesque” (Bakhtin 1984: 18-24) tangle with power through the excessive and outrageous costuming of participating government officials, the flagrant display of wealth by state officials in different forms, and the public exhibition of political control. The Calabar Carnival brings political power to the street and extends the spatiality of administrative control beyond the confines of political secretariats and administrative structures. It displays the divisions and hierarchies that exist in the society and lays out the street as a “landscape of power” (Zukin 1991: 232) where images that provide a “visual record of forms of [subtle] violence that reads as signs of a history” of political neglect and nonchalance are visualized on the street (Thomas 2012: 207). In the streets of Calabar during Calabar Carnival, power relations persist and follow the social dynamic of “dominance and subordination in modern capitalist societies” (Lears 1985: 567). Because of the capitalist economic motivation of the state's political elites and their supporters, who institute, organize, and direct the carnival on their own terms, the “subalterns” or the masses follow through a hegemonic system, with minor forms of unrecognized resistance from the margins. (Fig. 17).While the streets are laced with different forms of color, costume, sound, and performance that are either cultural, technical, or sophisticated stunts, as well as arts, creativity, entertainment, and commerce, the mechanism of power exhibited by agencies of government are also very prominent and easily noticeable, thus placing them “at the borderline between politics and aesthetics” (Peeren 2007: 69). There are also the voices of dissidents heralded in the streets (seemingly unheard), pointing to governmental negligence and misappropriation of public funds evidenced by a plethora of dilapidated and abandoned infrastructures, poverty, insecurity, and the spate of violent political acts perpetrated in the port capital city in recent years. During Calabar Carnival, the street becomes a converging space where cultural authenticity and invention, the secular and the vulgar, and cultural and visual performance, as well as local, national, and international identities and an “unnoticed” voice of dissent contest for dominance, while also converging to create a “multifocal spectacle” of a complex carnival.

Nsima Stanislaus Udo

Calabar Carnival

卡拉巴尔狂欢节

Visitors to Second Careers: Two Tributaries in African Art first encountered five striking photomontages in Tahir Carl Karmali's 2013 Untitled (Jua Kali Series) (Fig. 1). Using images of urban cityscapes alongside repurposed computer and car parts, the works reimagine select Kenyan creatives—including the artist—as Afrofuturist cyberpunks personifying the creative possibilities of the media surrounding them. As the show's introductory text explained, Karmali's series embodied “the materiality and accumulation” of an “array of salvaged materials” found across the work of the six twenty-first-century African artists featured in Second Careers: Elias Sime, Nnenna Okore, El Anatsui, Zohra Opoku, and Gonçalo Mabunda, and Karmali. But it also pointed to what Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, the exhibition's curator, framed as the continuity of these artists’ practices with historic African artforms. The Jua Kali Series’ label, for example, pointed to a similar “evocation of diverse materials” including pins, horns, ropes, and beads, on a nearby Songye figure. One of nine African works in the show from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, primarily drawn from the CMA collection, it was installed to meet the gazes of Karmali's portrait sitters and those of visitors as they entered the exhibition's main gallery.Explicit dialogic juxtapositions between historic, museum-held objects and loaned contemporary works were at the heart of Second Careers. In a single room, the show explored two critical threads: first, the “connections between historical African art and contemporary practices”; and second, how “historical” objects “made their way into the museum” and, in so doing, took up a “second career” as educators and “vectors of cultural memory.” The former thread continued Nzewi's previous work at the CMA, where he served as curator of African art from 2017 to 2019, when he installed works by Kendell Geers, Hervé Youmbi, and Pascale Marthine Tayou in the museum's African gallery otherwise dedicated to historic sculptures and masks.From Second Careers’ opening hallway, visitors turned right to enter the exhibition gallery. Anchoring the show was a paka egúngún ensemble, its mounting evoking the dynamism of its intended role as a masquerade (Fig. 2). This work was previously the focus of Kristen Windmuller-Luna's 2019 exhibition One: Egúngún at the Brooklyn Museum. Wind-muller-Luna, Second Careers’ host curator and current curator of African art the CMA, previously undertook detailed provenance research on this costume, connecting it to the Lekewogbe family of Ogbomoso. Her research served as one example of Second Careers’ efforts to use object labels to foreground the accumulated lives of African objects’ provenance histories. Placed at the gallery's center, the paka egúngún evoked the masquerade's originally intended role as an ancestral conduit and form of memorialization: a function that extended to many of the show's historic works through references to their own provenance histories. The label for a Yombe maternity figure, for example, included a discussion of its former name as the “Burniaux maternity figure,” after the Belgian collector who owned it prior to its 1998 acquisition by the CMA. Explicit discussions of object provenance remain woefully underused in exhibition spaces, and Second Careers pointed to African works’ role in collecting and community outside the continent. The label for a Baule figure (Fig. 3, right) noted its 1929 purchase by Cleveland's Karamu House—the United States’ oldest African American theater—before they donated it to the CMA in 1931. But a further discussion of the role of African sculpture in Cleveland's vibrant 1920s Black artistic community would have added significant depth to the historical context of this work's “second career,” especially considering it was one of three “historical” objects in the show not explicitly paired with a contemporary work. Instead, Second Careers’ core narrative stated that contemporary artists evoked structures of “communal memory associated with the historical objects, recalling traditional concepts from the past and transforming them into something new.”To make this argument, Second Careers juxtaposed objects with mutually resonant forms and materials. For example, El Anatsui's Earth Growing Roots (2007) (Fig. 4)—an undulating sculpture of repurposed bottle-caps—echoed the egúngún masquerade's “blur of colors and visual energy.” This reading was a welcome counterpoint to limiting analyses that derive Anatsui's work from kente cloth or completely disconnect it from deeper historical trajectories. Visitors could also move from the egúngún to Nnenna Okore's nearby When All Is Said and Done of 2016 (Fig. 5). Taking up the entire space between the floor and the ceiling - another dynamic and, here, monumentalizing installation of Second Careers’ contemporary works—its “humble materials” of burlap, jute, rope, wire, and dye were discussed as echoing those on a nearby Chokwe mwana pwo. Other labels effectively highlighted conceptual, as opposed to formal, resonances: Zohra Opoku's 2017 textile homage to her father, Nana Opoku Gyabaah II, Chidomhene of Asato/Akan (Fig. 6, right) for example, echoed “the cultural practice of honoring authoritative female figures or political leaders” exemplified by a Yombe maternity figure. The show's most effective contrasts united conceptual and formal continuities: Gonçalo Mabunda's 2009 Harmony Chair—constructed of repurposed mines, bullets, and grenades—invited new dialogues on the mutual imbrications of power and prestige with violence and subjugation, especially when placed next to a late nineteenth century Babanki chair from Cameroon, whose carved leopard motifs similarly served as “embodiments of power and royalty” (Fig. 7).Second Careers walked a fine, and occasionally slippery, line in these juxtapositions. Attentive readers likely noted that Second Careers framed its chosen dialogues between historical and contemporary works not as evidence of artistic influence, but rather as invitations to open dialogue about the long and continent-specific histories of contemporary African art. I worry, however, that some visitors may have walked away presuming that contemporary African artists were simply reproducing older “traditional” forms. The historic works’ presentation solely in vitrines may have invited this reading by implicitly distinguishing them as antecedents to the contemporary works. But perhaps there was a more subtle and critical question emerging from these divergent readings: how has the history of collecting African artworks in encyclopedic institutions limited the stories we can tell with the objects they now house, especially if the goal is to write a history of African art that centers African histories?For general audiences, as well as scholars of African modernisms, the exhibition's takeaway was clear: that twenty-first-century African artists are not only creating a diverse range of vibrant works and reimagining the possibilities beyond material hierarchies while doing so, but they are also working in the wake of deep histories of African artistic production on the continent and housed in Western museums. As a researcher focusing on eighteenth and nineteenth century works, however, I feel the show's core arguments about works’ multiple lives would have benefited by foregrounding the historical specificity of its pre-twenty-first century works, all of which were created in the context of devalued and repurposed foreign materials entering local markets. This long history of asymmetrical trade and strategic revaluation of materials tied together all of the objects in Second Careers, and even pointed to Africa's material losses of objects during the colonial era, which inaugurated the “second careers” of nine of the show's works. Yet no show could tackle all these issues in such a focused space: indeed, it is evidence of Second Careers’ success that it raised so many critical questions for museum visitors.Second Careers: Two Tributaries in African Art is accompanied by a publication of the same title (Cleveland Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2019; $25.00). It contains two well-illustrated essays by Nzewi (one on the historical place of African art in museums and one on the relation between contemporary historical practices in Africa), as well as invaluable in-depth interviews by Nzewi with five of the show's six twenty-first-century artists.

Matthew Francis Rarey

Second Careers: Two Tributaries in African Art

第二职业：非洲艺术中的两条支流

Abiodun Akande

A Reconsideration of the History and Iconology of Yorùbá Equestrian Figure through Two Ifá Verses and the Ojúde-Ọ ba Festival

通过两个Ifá经文和Ojúde-Ọ ba节重新审视约鲁巴骑马雕像的历史和图像学

Luís Urbano Afonso

Carlos Almeida

José da Silva Horta

Early African Ivories

早期非洲象牙制品

How does a late nineteenth or early twentieth century Kuba mask from the Democratic Republic of the Congo relate to Gilbert Stuart's 1796 portrait of George Washington? What ensues when we place vessels from twentieth and twenty-first century ceramicists working in Seoul, Nairobi, and Lagos in dialogue? African Arts—Global Conversations endeavored to answer these innovative queries. The exhibition cultivated a deeper understanding of African art through a global lens. While contemporary African art tends to be curated with transnational histories in mind, there has been less focus on situating classical and modern African art within a global canon. Kristen Windmuller-Luna, at the time the Sills Family Consulting Curator, African Arts, at the Brooklyn Museum, placed key works from the longue durée of African art history in other departments—American, European, Asian, Ancient Egyptian—as part of a multifloor installation. Global Conversations is a title apropos to the dialogue encouraged by experimental thematic groupings, which avoided presenting a teleological and periodized history of art. The exhibition was transparent about its art historical inheritance and, accordingly, about the political and intellectual impetus behind the curatorial decisions. The first-floor gallery of the exhibition was a visual and textual introduction to important themes in an international context, such as modernism, feminism, and architecture. A Freetown, Sierra Leone Mask for the Ordehlay (mid-twentieth century) was on display beside an ancient Greek statue, Serapis (30 bce-395 ce), under the theme of transculturalism (Fig. 1). Ordehlay association masks contain iconographic influences from Chinese cinema, Yoruba masquerade, and the water spirit Mami Wata. Like the transcultural Ordehlay mask, Serapis was a god created by Egypt's Ptolemaic rulers for the purpose of Greeks and Egyptians worshipping the same deity together. On the topic of multiple modernities, a painting by Ghanaian artist Atta Kwami (b. 1956), Another Time, Yebubuyi (2011) (Fig. 2) was placed in dialogue with Study for Homage to the Square “High Tenor” (1959) by American artist Josef Albers (1888–1976). Eschewing a singular Euro-American narrative, this pairing illustrates how abstraction crafts multiple modernisms. In addition to a wide range of artworks, there were art history textbooks on display in a vitrine: a range from the 1930s to 1970s, including examples like Hendrik Willem van Loon and Grace Castagnetta's The Arts (1937) and H.W. Jansons History of Art (1970). These books, opened at distinct pages with highlighted paragraphs as archetypal examples, referenced the ways in which African art has historically been reduced to a primitivist footnote or referenced humbly as an inspiration to European modernists like Picasso. These difficult conversations and essential interventions must not be limited to curatorial practice in the museum, but rather, were made evident in art historical pedagogy writ large. The Eurocentric scope of the textbooks was remedied by the global conversations staged throughout the exhibition—initiated by Africanist interventions.In the Asian art gallery space, Untitled (1992), a white porcelain vessel from Korean artist Kang Suk Young (b. 1949), was accompanied in a vitrine by Symmetrical Reduced Black Narrow-Necked Tall Piece (1990) by Kenyan-British artist Magdalene Anyango N. Odundo OBE (b. 1950) and Antafi (2019) by British-Nigerian artist Ranti Bam (b. 1984) (Fig. 3). This curatorial grouping disrupted the notion of an authentic and insular Asian or African history of material culture. These contemporary ceramicists are each influenced by their personal cultural heritage, as well as slip-casting technique, Greek pottery, San Ildefonso Pueblo artists, and a diverse range of other technical aesthetic strategies. Another transcultural dialogue was present in the European wing through the placement of processional crosses from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries by Amhara artists in Ethiopia (Fig. 4). Although Christianity has been in Ethiopia since the fourth century, mainstream histories of Christian iconography often exclude Africa. Connections between Catholic Italy and Orthodox Ethiopia were staged through the installation of Amhara processional crosses with a fourteenth century processional cross by the Master of Monte del Lago in Italy. Another exhibition highlight was the juxtaposition of a Kongo power figure (nkisi nkondi) from the nineteenth century with the Egyptian Statue of Ity-Sen (2500–2350 bce), which was possibly excavated from the Tomb of Rawer in Giza. The works were thematically united through their disempowerment through iconoclastic acts—the head and feet removed from Ity-Sen and the magical medicine pack removed from the Kongo figure. This pairing also raised concerns about the historic separation of Ancient Egyptian objects from the rest of the African continent in museum collections—here, Egypt was reconnected to an African art history.Two interventions stood out in the art of the Americas: a Kuba mask within the line of sight of the infamous Washington portrait (1796) by Stuart (Fig. 5), and a Beauford Delaney (1901–1979) painting, Untitled (Fang Sculpture, Crow and Fruit) from 1945 grouped with a Fang reliquary guardian figure (ca. 1750–1860) by an Ntem River Valley Master in the Mvaï subgroup of the Fang ethnic group. The former grouping grappled with differing aesthetic approaches to the narrativization of origins: the personification of Wóót, the mythical ancestor of the Kuba, and the founding father myth of George Washington and the origins of the United States in the Stuart portrait. In the latter, Delaney's painting and the Fang reliquary figure highlighted the influential nature of African arts on the Harlem Renaissance. Accompanied by two books—The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925) by Alain Locke and Negerplastik (1915) by Carl Einstein—the pair raised difficult questions about the ways in which the primitivizing gaze of a text like Negerplastik mediated how Harlem Renaissance figures like Alain Locke and Beauford Delaney understood African art.For African art historians and curators in the twenty-first century, there has been an increased attention to globality in the lifeworlds of African artists, yet we still grapple with the most nuanced ways of putting African art in dialogue with other periodized art histories, especially in museum collections. The historic departments of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, although growing obsolete, have been a generalizing and primitivizing approach to resist. At the other end, we do not want to fall into the trap in which a “one tribe, one style” lens becomes the most dominant, as warned by Sydney Littlefield Kasfir (1984). The Department of African Arts at the Brooklyn Museum was formed very recently, in 2018, after many years of having been combined with art of the Pacific world. Windmuller-Luna succeeded at a balanced approach, in which African art objects can still be placed in dialogue with other Indigenous and non-African artists without the racist and colonialist primitivizing umbrella as a framework. The exhibition was celebrated through a “Virtual Art History Happy Hour” event on October 22, 2020. During the event, Lagos-based artist Taiye Idahor (b. 1984) discussed her ongoing Ivie Series. African American Studies and English assistant professor Nijah Cunningham, from Hunter College, spoke on the exhibition's ability to produce an image of global exchange. Joshua Cohen, assistant professor of art history at the City College of New York, presented on the implications of comparative frameworks in the exhibition.Overall, in African Arts—Global Conversations African art was placed in a series of philosophical and formal dialogues with works in other collections. This curatorial project pushed the field toward a global art history that refused hegemonic standards in which African art becomes important only through a Western ethnographic gaze. One may interpret this curatorial gesture as a pedagogical one, in which the inclusion of works from sub-Saharan Africa in other collections provides a critical learning opportunity for other collections.

Alexandra M. Thomas

African Arts — Global Conversations

非洲艺术——全球对话

In 1842, the financier George Riggs built a spacious home on a hill in the northern reaches of Washington, DC. Purchased nine years later by the Federal Government as a home for veterans, it became part of a larger complex around Fort Totten dedicated to convalescing soldiers, complete with verdant lawns and a rustic neighborhood feel. During the American Civil War, the Riggs house—improbably dubbed a “cottage”—was a steady redoubt for the president, Abraham Lincoln, who could visit with his army and gather his thoughts at a clarifying four-mile remove from the White House. All told, Lincoln spent roughly a year of his term there, including the weeks leading up the 1863 Gettysburg Address and the day before his assassination in 1865. Despite this history, the Cottage, with its elegant visitors’ center, is off the beaten track for most tourists, remaining a hidden gem for area residents.During the winter of 2023, the Cottage was the site of an installation by the Cotonou-based transnational artist Georges Adéagbo, who developed Create to Free Yourselves: Abraham Lincoln and the History of Freeing Slaves in America (2023) through his typical blend of field-based research and collaboration with artists in Benin. The result reimagined the nineteenth-century residence through Adéagbo's signature arrays of precolonial sculpture, found ephemera (books, vinyl records, VHS cassettes), and hand-illustrated historical scenes. Mounted in custom vitrines and on walls and mantlepieces, the installation activated the building anew, creating an unexpected dialectic of place, certainly, but also temporalities, allowing an often sentimentalized period to resonate in the present. Lincoln is celebrated throughout the District, most notably in the neoclassical monument on the National Mall and the area around Ford's Theater. At the Cottage, Adéagbo encouraged viewers to think about Lincoln in a time in which the abolition of enslavement faced uncertainty in the United States and internationally. He also demonstrated how Lincoln's words would take on symbolic resonances well beyond American shores. Create to Free Yourselves was a reading of Lincoln and “emancipation” from a more global vantage, and a reminder that familiar narratives have a long afterlife of their own.Such afterlives and reconfigurations have long been central to Adéagbo's practice. Now in his ninth decade, the artist has established a celebrated nomadic method in which his own collections merge with material found around the cities—like Berlin, Stockholm, Dakar, and Washington, DC—where he finds himself. Necessarily ephemeral, one more often reads about his projects in magazines than sees them in situ. Being there, in person, produced a sense of envelopment, of being overwhelmed by materials and associations. Familiar objects, like a Judd Apatow or Aaron Sorkin movie, a used copy of a Leon Uris novel, or vintage sporting jerseys are juxtaposed with the less familiar, but legibly “African”—a poster of “Dahomey Art,” a King Sunny Ade record sleeve, and wood-hewn sculptures spiral out from the center of an array, like celestial objects. This is vintage Adéagbo, in which single artifacts create a cascade of associations within his ever-growing repository of materials, forming new connections still. Here, biblical motifs abounded: gestures of protection or redemption; or more literal image/text depictions of decisive moments in Lincoln's presidency.The latter appeared to be historic scenes of Lincoln addressing leaders at a table, or standing in contemplation; but each also contains more coded symbolism, such as a key, re-animated bodies, or Adéagbo himself standing next to the statue of Lincoln and his horse, which was installed just outside the cottage. Purpose-made for the occasion with comic-like cels and French captioning, (reminiscent of Congolese painter Cheri Samba), these tableaux and their texts suggested a metaphysical dimension to Lincoln's historical deeds, a sense underscored by Adéagbo's evocations of rams’ heads and the Abraham of the Old Testament. Taken together, these assemblages can feel overwhelming in their seeming heterogeneity and rhetorical multiaccentuality. On one hand, it has long been tempting to read his work in more modernist tendencies such as surrealist excavations of mythic symbols or the archival and taxonomic impulses of the 1960s. On the other, when viewed in the larger arc within his practice, this most recent project evokes a sense of simultaneous transience and continuity at variance with Western aesthetics: Create to Free Yourselves was a temporary coalescing of intention, in turn activated in relation to the space and the viewer. At the same time, it was, too, part of a longer sequence of such interventions. As Dana Rush and others have suggested, this seeming tension between ephemerality and irresolution actually typifies artistic practice in Benin specifically, and socially enmeshed creative approaches in western Africa generally. Such a reading is supported by Adéagbo's inclusion of both Yoruban and Fon sculptural forms throughout.Such an ephemeral aesthetic approach was especially powerful in the context of Washington, DC, where memorials and museums throughout the city (including Lincoln's Cottage) rely on a sense of permanence and highly polished didactic information. By working in dialogue with such curatorial modes, Adéagbo reminded the viewer that historical meaning is much more open-ended and provisional than they might imagine. This was true in terms of the temporal dialectic that Adéagbo opened between Lincoln's presidency, the later era of anticolonial and independence movements, and the present moment of racial reckoning in many parts of the world. Create to Free Yourselves also invited the viewer to consider what Lincoln's presidency might mean beyond the purview of American self-narration. For instance, the years between 1860 and 1865 were a time of political transition in Benin itself, and a moment when the interdiction of the trans-Atlantic trade in enslaved people changed the economic structures not just of the United States, but of every location in the Black Atlantic world. Similarly, as Adéagbo makes clear, the resonance of Lincoln not just as a state leader, but a potent figure in the public imaginary plainly extends beyond the city, and into the ideals and aspirations of people continents away.In these ways, Create to Free Yourselves was very much consistent with the broader sweep of Adéagbo's global itinerary and, for that reason, did not lend itself to easy reconciliation. Instead, it activated an underappreciated node in DC's network of commemorative display, opening up new spatial and temporal vectors of meaning. By now, readers of these pages might know what to expect from Adéagbo's method. Yet, his place-centered refusal to reduce his art to legible commodity Create to Free Yourselves feel at once surprising and poignant—it was a rare gift to see such transient work in person.

Ian Bourland

Create to Free Yourself curated by Stephan Köhler

由斯蒂芬·科勒策展的“创作以释放自我”

Henry John Drewal

Bámigbóyè: A Master Sculptor of the Yorùbá Tradition curated by James Green and Bámigbóyè: A Master Sculptor of the Yorùbá Tradition by James Green with contributions by Olúṣẹ̀yẹ Adéṣọlá, Anne Turner Gunnison, Efeoghene Igor, Will Rea, and Cathy Silverman

巴米格博耶：由詹姆斯·格林策展的约鲁巴传统雕塑大师与巴米格博耶：由詹姆斯·格林主编，奥卢塞延·阿德索拉、安妮·特纳·冈尼森、埃菲奥根·伊戈尔、威尔·里亚和凯茜·西尔弗曼的贡献

all photos: Don Cole, courtesy of the Fowler Museum at UCLA, except where otherwise notedFrom October 29th, 2023 to June 2024, the Fowler Museum at UCLA presents The House Was Too Small: Yorùbá Sacred Arts from Africa and Beyond in conjunction with the Museum's sixtieth anniversary celebration. Bringing together historical and contemporary objects from West Africa and the Americas, the exhibition illustrates the historical legacy as well as the changing and expanding global relevance of Yorùbá religion. Core religious principles are visualized and enacted through sculpture, beadwork, ritual costumes, and other sacred art forms from Yorùbáland (Nigeria and Benin) and the Yorùbá diaspora in the Americas. Scholars have termed this vast area the Yorùbá Atlantic, a cultural sphere connecting art, people, and ideas across time and space that has been profoundly affected by empire-building, colonialism, the violence of enslavement, international trade networks, and global immigration patterns. For centuries, Yorùbá peoples and their descendants in different parts of the Atlantic world have maintained— often in the face of brutal oppression—crucial elements of their shared heritage. Although Yorùbá (or Yorùbá-inspired) religious traditions are practiced throughout the Americas, this exhibition juxtaposes sacred art from Afro-Brazilian Candomblé and Afro-Cuban Lucumí with comparable pieces from Yorùbáland. Accordingly, in identifying the various works on display we have chosen to include either Yorùbá, Portuguese, or Spanish spellings to highlight their unique regional and linguistic contexts within the Yorùbá Atlantic.1The House Was Too Small continues a legacy of public engagement with Yorùbá or Yorùbá-inspired religious arts at the Fowler Museum that began with Black Gods and Kings: Yorùbá Art at UCLA (1971). That groundbreaking exhibition was followed by major shows such as Beads, Body, and Soul: Art and Light in the Yorùbá Universe (1998) and Axé Bahia: The Power of Art in an Afro-Brazilian Metropolis (2017) as well as a series of smaller ones including From the Inside to the Outside: The Art and Ritual of Bahian Candomblé (1984) and Double Fortune, Double Trouble: Art for Twins among the Yorùbá (2013). Although many of the objects on display in the current installation will be familiar to visitors who have seen these previous exhibitions, The House Was Too Small builds upon the rigorous scholarship of those projects and adds a broader comparative approach to presentation and interpretation. Artworks dedicated to orishas and ancestral spirits (Egun or Egungun), and ritual tools for divination (Ifa) and healing attest to a theological and aesthetic heritage shared across time, continents, and an ocean. Whether utilized by Yorùbá peoples in nineteenth-century West Africa or twenty-first-century practitioners of Yorùbá-derived religion in the diaspora—those who follow Brazilian Candomblé or Cuban Lucumí—these objects facilitate transformational experiences resulting from encounters with the divine.Organized as part of the Fowler Museum's Engaging Lived Religion project, which was funded by Lilly Endowment Inc.’s Religion and Cultural Institutions Initiative, the exhibition strives to include the perspectives and voices of constituents ensure a comprehensive and culturally sensitive engagement with these objects. For this reason, Fowler staff established a curatorial collective including practitioners, academics, and artists devoted to Yorùbá and Yorùbá-inspired faiths in Nigeria, Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States. Drawing on their religious training, scholarly research, artistic vision, and lived experience, this collective selected the objects included in the exhibition. Additionally, individual team members provided gallery text descriptions for selected artworks highlighting their individual perspectives on and experiences with those sacred arts. The curatorial collective for The House Was Too Small included: Rowland Ọ̀lá Abíọdún (John C. Newton Professor of Art History and Black Studies, Amherst College); Roberto Conduru (Endowed Distinguished Professor of Art History, SMU); Patrisse Cullors (artist, author, abolitionist); Oluwo'Nla Irawoifa, a.k.a. Amos Dyson (Olowu, Ifa Temple Otura Tukaa); Olowu Fakolade, a.k.a. Jahsun Edmonds (Oluwo, Idin Kaa Ifa Temple); Awo Falokun Fasegun, a.k.a. Earl White (Ile Orunmila Afedefeyo); Ysamur Flores-Peña (associate professor, Otis School of Art); Erica P. Jones (senior curator of African Arts and manager of curatorial affairs, Fowler Museum); Elizabeth Pérez (associate professor of religion, UCSB); and Patrick A. Polk (senior curator of Latin American and Caribbean popular arts, Fowler Museum).The first section of the exhibition examines the importance of arts related to the head; in all of these traditions, worship bears an inexorable link to the individual and betterment of the self. In traditional Yorùbá belief, the head (ori) is the site of a person's consciousness, individuality, and spiritual intuition. All divinities (orishas) and humans brought into being by Olodumare, the Supreme Creator, have both a visible head (ori-ode) and an inner spiritual one (ori-inu). Ori-inu is closely associated with the fulfilment of one's destiny; its caretaking is central to Yorùbá and Yorùbá-inspired religions. Through divination, offerings to ancestors and orishas, initiation, and other ritual practices, adherents seek to develop good character (iwa pele) and thus achieve spiritual harmony.Two categories of Yorùbá sacred arts underscore the importance of the visible and the inner spiritual heads: crowns (adenla) worn on special occasions by kings and religious practitioners; and containers known as “house of the head” (ile ori) that enclose and protect objects (ibori) that symbolize one's inner head. Prestigious and often elaborately beaded, adenla encase and spiritually guard the physical head. Ile ori, frequently encrusted with cowrie shells, are costly to produce and require devoted ritual care. An ile ori is a testament to the owners’ self-respect and dedication to their good character.The second section of the exhibition, by far its largest, features ten displays of iconic accoutrements dedicated to paramount orishas. Above these hang color-coded banners bearing the common spellings of each deity's name in the Yorùbá, Portuguese, Spanish, and English languages. Variously described as spirits, personified natural forces, or deified ancestors, orishas are entities that serve as the Supreme Being Olodumare's emissaries on earth. Mediators between terrestrial and spiritual realms, they act as moral role models and aid people in dealing with everyday realities. Humanlike in character and form, orishas are dynamic presences in the lives of worshipers. In some ceremonies, initiates become vessels for divine embodiment and temporarily personify deities through dress, dance, song, speech, and other actions.The orishas are often categorized based on personality traits: those that are calm in demeanor are considered cool, or funfun; the more assertive ones are hot, or gbigbona. They may also be grouped by familial relationships or shared obligations and interests. Although the pantheon of orishas is large and ever-expanding, those commonly evoked in personal and public rites are relatively few. The organization of the orisha section in the exhibition reflect shared traits or special relationships that link specific orishas with one another. Thus, objects created for Ogun are adjacent to those made for Oshosi on account of their shared identity as warriors. Likewise, emblems of the divine consorts Shango and Oshun are placed in proximity. Crafted by artists and utilized by worshipers, these works materialize the spiritual energy (ashe) of the orishas.The most ubiquitous of all orishas, Eshu mediates between human and spiritual realms and is a source of revelation. Accordingly, his sacred objects regularly feature cowrie shells of the type used in divination. Hailed as a “road maker,” he opens the way for all that happens—good or bad—and is invoked at the beginning and ending of ceremonies. Eshu may serve as a benign intercessor when properly honored, or sow chaos when ignored or angered. His icons are often stationed at crossroads, town gates, and entrances to sacred and profane spaces. For this reason, in his exhibition, works depicting him are located at every doorway and point of transition.Inventor of the forge and patron of blacksmiths, Ogun personifies strength, ingenuity, single-minded determination, and the hardness of metal. His implements, primarily fashioned from iron, include weapons of war and tools of labor. Where his brother Eshu opens a path, Ogun uses his sword or machete to remove all obstacles that may appear. A strong-tempered warrior, protective father, and tireless worker for justice, he is one of the most widely worshiped Orishas within the Yorùbá Atlantic. In this gallery, ritual objects dedicated to him are placed near those of Oshosi and Eshu.The son of Yemoja, goddess of the sea, Oshosi is an archetypal hunter and master fisherman. Praised as “the king of the forest,” he acts as protector of the natural environments in which he chases his quarry. Oshosi is also revered as a model of ethical behavior and a guardian of all who are unjustly imprisoned, persecuted, or pursued. With his bow and arrow, he hunts and fights alongside his sibling Ogun. Widely recounted sacred narratives emphasize their ability to work together on solving their own problems and those encountered by worshipers.The younger brother of Orunmila, the god of wisdom, Ossain is the supreme herbalist in the pantheon of orishas. Envisioned as having an imperfect body—one eye, one arm, and one leg—he nonetheless has perfect knowledge of healing. Like Olodumare, Ossain is described as “one who sees everything,” and his devotees are carefully trained in traditional techniques of healing, with an encyclopedic knowledge of medicinal plants. His emblematic metal staff, which features a large bird, sometimes surrounded by a circle of smaller ones, emphasizes the heavenly vantage point from which he protects all of humanity.In the Yorùbá language, Oshun's name means “source.” As with Yemoja, the cooling energy of freshwater flows from her. The epitome of beauty and sensuality, she is draped in gold and associated with fertility, love, prosperity, and healing. Her fan sweeps away negative elements and purifies the air around her and her adherents. Credited in sacred narratives as the favorite wife of Shango and mother of Eshu and the Ibeji, she is described as a “crowned woman” in recognition of her status among the first gods sent to earth by Olodumare.Obatala, the first orisha created by the Supreme Being Olodumare, was assigned the task of fashioning the world. He and his younger brother Oduduwa are the architects of the terrestrial realm as we know it and the ones who gave physical form to humans. A wise and compassionate patriarch, Obatala is praised as the “king of the white cloth,” which implies purity and calmness. Accordingly, his sacred arts emphasize whiteness and regality. Priests of Obatala utilize prestige objects that mirror those of royalty, such as beaded conical crowns, staffs, and horsehair flywhisks, highlighting the orisha's position of regal authority.In Yorùbáland, Yemoja (literally, Mother of Fish) is most closely associated with rivers, streams, springs, and other sources of fresh water, while in the diaspora, she is more often represented as the goddess of the ocean. Patron of women, especially those who are pregnant, she is an ideal maternal figure who, according to some mythological accounts, gave birth to all the orishas as well as the Sun and the Moon. Her emblems and ritual accoutrements highlight blue and pink colors, and are replete with aquatic, nautical, and celestial motifs.The Yorùbá peoples have one of the highest rates of twin births in the world. In response to infant mortality, historically, carved wood figures of one or both twins (Ere Ibeji) memorialized the deceased and served as surrogates. As spiritual entities linked to the orishas Oshun and Shango, Ibeji are capable of bringing wealth to their families when honored or misfortune if forgotten. Accordingly, they are handled with great ritual care, including bathing, dressing, adorning, and feeding. In Yorùbáland, this materializing of departed children dates back to the mid-eighteenth century and became widespread by the mid-nineteenth century. More recently, and elsewhere in the Yorùbá Atlantic, handmade cloth dolls and mass-produced plastic ones have replaced sculpted wood Ibeji.A fiercely masculine figure, Shango is believed to have been the fourth king of the Yorùbá kingdom of Oyo-Ile before his apotheosis as an orisha. He is remembered as a warlike, if not tyrannical, ruler who brought power and prosperity to an expanding empire. The divine Shango's character is shaped by the same intertwined destructive and creative energies. Lord of thunder, lightning, and fire, he personifies the power and unpredictably of those elemental forces. A punisher of transgressors, he is also viewed by devotees as a giver of children and is particularly associated with twins. His sacred colors are red and white, and his most notable symbol is the double-headed axe.Oko (or commonly Orisha Oko) is a deity of agriculture and fertility of the land. According to traditional narratives, Oko was a farmer with great knowledge of leaves, herbs, and medicine who lived in the ancient Yorùbá village of Irawu. During a famine, he used his abilities to protect his neighbors from starvation. When they refused to honor their promise to make him king, he left them forever. As an orisha, he ensures the health of the land and a prodigious harvest. A primary emblem of Oko is a metal staff made of farmer's hoes that have been welded together.The third section addresses the practice of divination with the help of three local diviners. Created by Orunmila, an orisha associated with intellectual growth and knowledge, Ifa divination is a central component of Yorùbá-based modes of worship in Africa and the Americas. Facilitated by Eshu, the divine messenger, the oracular system offers seekers insights into the circumstances of their lives and provides ethical and moral guidance. At the heart of Ifa divination is an expansive corpus of oracular texts (odu Ifa) whose verses are memorized by diviners (babalawos). Said to be the accumulated teachings of Orunmila, odu Ifa includes mythological narratives, proverbs, poems, and instructive accounts of human experience organized into 256 categories. In 2005, Ifa divination was added to the UNESCO list of “Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.”Using a set of ritual tools, including palm nuts (ikin Ifa), powder from the irosun tree (iyerosun), carved wooden trays (opon Ifa), tappers (iroke Ifa), and divining chains (opele) made of wood, metal, or ivory, babalawos employ a complex system of mathematical signs to access the wisdom of Orunmila. When divining with ikin Ifa, the oldest practice, babalawos hold sixteen nuts in their left hand and then pass all but one or two ikin to their right hand. Eight repetitions of this casting process will determine the appropriate verses of Odu Ifa that will address a supplicant's situation.As part of our engagement with practitioners of Ifa, the Fowler Museum invited three babalawos who live in Southern California—Oluwo'Nla Irawoifa (Amos Dyson), Olowu Fakolade (Jahsun Edmonds), and Awo Falokun Fasegun (Earl White)—to utilize Ifa tools from the museum's collection for divination and demonstration. An accompanying video, filmed during those ritual and instructional sessions, illustrates key elements of the Ifa divination process.The fourth section touches on how faith communities and individual practitioners throughout the Yorùbá Atlantic honor the dead and recognize ancestors as active participants in the everyday world. Olodumare, the Supreme Being who created existence, appointed Death (Iku) to recall to Heaven (Oran) those whose time on earth (Aye) has been fulfilled. While their bodies are buried in the ground, their spirits or souls enter the afterlife as ancestral forces (Egun or Egungun) who have the power to intercede in the realm of the living.Beyond facilitating remembrance of the dead, sacred arts reinforce continuing relationships between the living and the deceased. In Yoràbáland, Egungun masqueraders, described as “Visitors from Heaven” (Ara-Orun), embody ancestors at festivals venerating the dead. In Brazil, costumed Egungun performances are more narrowly connected to select Afro- Brazilian religious communities, most notably those living on the island of Itaparica in the Bay of Todos os Santos in the state of Bahia.Household shrines also serve as foci for interacting with ancestors. In the Yorùbá-inspired Cuban Lucumí religious tradition, for example, altars for the dead (Egun or Muertos) include staffs adorned with colorful strips of cloth that are reminiscent of Yorùbá Egungun costumes. Featuring serving dishes, glasses, candles, and offerings of food and drink, these ritual spaces are reminders that the homes of the living also belong to the ancestors.In the fifth and final section of the exhibition, artist and abolitionist Patrisse Cullors presents a new multimedia installation entitled Free Us. Divided between two rooms, the work includes a screening space for a video titled They Are With Us in which the artist, dressed in elaborate crowns and costumes, embodies four orishas: Oshun, Yemaya, Obatala, and Oya. In the second section, four wall-mounted mixed-media artworks referencing Ifa divination are juxtaposed with four altars dedicated to the same orishas as in the video. The altars include offerings, a set of orisha crowns seen in the video, and objects from the Fowler Museum's collection. A soundscape (UnEarthing Altars) of rolling water and prayers chanted in multiple languages fills the room with echoes of worship.Cullors reflects powerfully on expressions of human resilience and lived experiences of healing throughout the Yorùbá Atlantic, themes which members of our curatorial collective frequently emphasized in developing the exhibition. Concerning this, Cullors states,The focus on wellbeing, empathy, and collective action, unites not only the fundamental concepts of this exhibition, but also the method of its curation. The collaborative approach to project development, the comparative mode of presenting sacred arts, and the hands-on engagement of community members with displayed objects, all provide, hopefully, the viewing public with a better sense of the dynamic histories— and futures—of Yorùbá and Yorùbá-inspired religions.

Erica P. Jones

Patrick A. Polk

The House Was Too Small: Yorùbá Sacred Arts from Africa and Beyond

房子太小：来自非洲及其他地区的约鲁巴神圣艺术

Conceived of in conjunction with the exhibition (2019-2022) of the same name at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, curator Kevin D. Dumouchelle's handsome book Heroes: Principles of African Greatness, is a significant stand-alone contribution to the popular study of African art (see Bourland 2021). This dynamic large-format volume reads diverse objects in NMAfA's collection through the concept of the heroic, sensitive to the tragic and contradictory dimensions of the concept of the Hero in African and global cultural repertoires. Although especially geared towards engaging teens and young people in African social and art history, the book is illuminating and thought-provoking for specialists and nonspecialists of all ages.In many respects, the volume is an homage to the grand tradition of comics and graphic storytelling in twentieth century Africa, which creatively reworked the visual vocabularies of Anglo-American superhero comics, French graphic novels such as Tintin, and Japanese manga—in light of indigenous narrative aesthetics (often embedded in song and music) and anticolonial cultural politics. The overall tone is set by the catalogue's exuberant comic-style cover by the Brazilian graphic artist Butcher Billy (Fig. 1). Haitian revolutionary hero Toussaint Louverture, arms akimbo, is flanked by Black male and female figures breaking their chains, with silhouetted background images of uplifted arms, as rays radiate towards the viewer from the background. "Choose your own adventure," the banner text proclaims.As in many forms of African popular storytelling, the catalogue's recounting of epic and mythic history encourages reflection on the proximate challenges of coming of age and fashioning the self. The project equally emerges out of the political and cultural ferment of the #BlackLives-Matter moment, as museums have sought to recognize a long history of oppression directed against communities of African descent while also stimulating a sense of creative optimism in younger generations embedded in a new era of hip-hop-savvy street protest. The medium is the message here: bright colors, flashy imagery, comic book-style fonts, and commentary in the style of LP record liner notes evoke what Robert Farris Thompson (1973) dubbed an "aesthetic of the cool," a distinctive pan-African sensibility that is polyrhythmic, highly immersive, and predicated on the free-flowing circulation of intersubjective experience and energies between audience, artist, and performer. Dumochelle cleverly integrates the familiar genre of the art catalogue with the look and feel of a graphic novel, recalling the dynamism of superhero comics series. The book also has the look and feel of some of the greatest African and diasporic musical albums, from Fela Anikulapo-Kuti's Black President and King Sunny Ade's Juju to Bob Marley and the Wailer's Exodus. Appropriately, the volume is presented in conjunction with an irresistible musical playlist, available on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Music, all integrated into a dynamic multimedia platform on the africa.si.edu website: https://africa.si.edu/exhibitions/current-exhibitions/heroes-principles-of-african-greatness/The pivotal art work in the book, as in the exhibition, is Ousmane Sow's monumental sculpture, Toussaint Louverture et la vielle esclave (1989) (Fig. 2), in which the standing revolutionary male hero gives comfort to a kneeling newly liberated older woman. Dumochelle writes that the entire project emerged through his desire to bring back on display within the museum Ousmane Sow's towering rendition of Louverture, in conversation with several old and new works in the collection. Sow's vision of upright African-descended dignity resonated for Dumouchelle with Bob Marley's lyrics "Get up! Stand up!"—a kind of global anthem of Black self-affirmation, and spoke to the curator's personal background in public diplomacy and community-based activism. The Louverture figure, echoed on the book's cover, is equally intertwined with the text's celebration of anticolonial theorist Franz Fanon, foundational to Black Consciousness, for whom heroic revolutionary violence might catalyze self-realization among previously colonized peoples.To be sure, for many viewers Sow's sculpture uncomfortably reproduces a patriarchal spectacle of masculine domination over a dependent female and echoes a classic trope in which historical agency is focused on a few (generally male) heroic individuals while the masses (including women) are relegated to being acted upon by History. In the project's defense, it should be noted that the Louverture image is primarily a jumping off point for Dumouchelle and that he develops the concept of "the heroic" to extend far beyond singular individuals as the deciding fulcrum of history; rather, the heroic here is a common heritage bequeathed to all humankind, to be mobilized creatively at moments of challenge, injustice, and crisis.In so doing, Dumouchelle deftly evokes the cosmological and ritual dimensions of leadership in diverse African societies, in which the sovereign embodies a kind of living portal between the visible world of mortals and the invisible world of the Dead and the hidden powers. The museum's soaring Benin odudua mask inaugurates the book's fourth section, which explores the motif of the ancestral grove, in which the Living and the Dead collaborate to reproduce future generations. El Anatsui's relatively early figurative The Ancestors Converged Again (1995), which, the artist notes, can be rearranged each time it is newly installed, evokes the endlessly fluid functions of the ancestral Dead, when called upon in changing circumstances.Notably, Dumouchelle's curatorial vision is not limited to the life-sustaining function of the Dead in conventional models of the social order. The book's opening work, paired with Ousmane Sow's sculptural homage to revolutionary antislavery leader Toussaint Louverture, is coffin-maker Paa Joe's haunting large-scale model of Fort William-Anomabu, the notorious site of no return for innumerable victims of the Atlantic slave trade. A vast symbolic coffin, the sculpture arguably functions as a ritualized ancestral womb world, out of which millions of heirs of the Middle Passage were historically birthed. In turn, the martyred women's rights activist Funmilayo-Ransome Kuti, murdered at her son Fela Kuti's compound when raided by the Nigerian military regime, is honored midway through the book, along with her son's famous dirge for his mother and the tortured body politic of the nation, "Coffin for Head State": "Them kill my mama / So I carry the coffin."Indeed, taken as a whole, the project embodies what might be thought of as the diarchic, gender-integrated cosmology of leadership in African societies, in which male and female principles of sovereignty are inextricably interwoven. Throughout the book, we encounter juxtaposed imagery of masculine and feminine agency. The Edo ododua mask is followed by an Akan nsodia commemorative feminine head and memorial sculpture that could be read as evocative of such figures as the queen mother Asantewaa, who led Asante anticolonial resistance to British occupation. Liner notes on the martyred Ken Saro-Wiwa of Ogoniland are followed by a striking wooden female figure, likely an Urhobo Edjo ancestress figurine, honoring powerful women in the history of Nigeria's Delta region. In a similar vein, Gora Mbengue's glass painting of Sheikh Amodou Bamba, the anticolonial Sufi founder of the Senegalese Mouride brotherhood, is followed by Ghada Amer's polished steel The Blue Bra Girls (2012), celebrating women activists in the 2012 Tarhir Square protests against the repressive military regime in Cairo. Male-oriented visual celebrations of Ethiopian imperial rule, in turn, are paired with the Queen of Sheba. (Even Ousmane Sow's fraught sculpture of Louverture and the elderly woman could be read as embodying a principle of bigendered sovereignty, in which leadership of the nation depends on joint rule, classically shared between king and queen-mother.) The central unit of the volume, Section Five, is entirely devoted to "Women Warriors," linking classical works such as the collection's Kongo Phemba maternity figure to Liberian woman peace activist Leymah Gbowee and Sokari Douglas Camp's kinetic sculpture, Small Iriabo (Clapping Girl) (1987). The net effect is a liberatory vision of African cultural production and historical agency that cuts across conventional gendered dichotomies.I have only a few reservations about this exemplary volume, which is skillfully designed with high production values throughout. Overall, I was surprised by the relative paucity of African photographic art or African artists' books in the volume, rather puzzling given the exemplary collections in the museum's Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives and Warren M. Robbins Library. A chapter devoted to post-apartheid South Africa is strong in terms of liner notes on major South African political and cultural figures, but rather weak on art work per se, perhaps reflecting limitations in NMAfA's current collections. Two 1996 works by Willie Bester (Apartheid Laboratory and The Notorious Green Car) are painfully tragicomic. There are fine mid-1990s works by Kay Hassan and Sue Williamson, and a clever conceptual piece, Prison Sentences (2010) by William Boshoff. The chapter concludes with a 2018 acrylic and mixed media work by Dada Khanyisa, the youngest artist in the catalogue, which rightfully honors emergent LGBTQ+ artists. Yet, a reader unfamiliar with more recent South African art would get little sense of the extraordinary vibrancy and derring-do of the nation's art worlds over the past two decades. To take one example, a double page entry on Steve Biko lacks any of the potent art created in his memory: surely borrowed images of some of these important visual works could have been incorporated.A fascinating closing essay by Kevin Dumouchelle details the process through which the Heroes exhibition was conceived and developed. The overall project, he explains, was informed by the work of scholars such as David Friedberg and Alfred Gell, who have emphasized that the power of images, which far exceeds artists' initial intentionalities, is enmeshed is a complex historical choreography of endlessly shifting interpretations and political contestation. Works of art, in effect, take on complex lives and afterlives in often tumultuous new contexts. This graceful autobiographical commentary would serve as an excellent stand-alone reading in a museum studies course on contemporary postcolonial curatorial practice. (In hindsight, the chapter is also, if I might be permitted a plaintive aside, an elegy for the prematurely removed Heroes exhibition, which was unfortunately closed by NMAfA's former director during her short, controversial tenure at the museum.)Mirrors and reflective surfaces have a venerable history in African divinatory practice. At times embedded in mortuary and power figures, mirrors call upon the beholder to enter into revelatory dream worlds that may be destabilizing but which are, at the end of the day, deeply transformative. We glimpse puzzling images of those who have come before intermingled with fragmented refractions of our own visage, hinting at where we and our posterity might be headed. Such operations depend on degrees of didactic shock—in James Fernandez's felicitous phrase, on "edification through puzzlement." Holding open this large, engaging, and provocative volume in our hands is, I suggest, rather like holding up a large mirror, which calls us into the mythic dreamtime of African spiritualities and enduring struggles for collective liberation. As we page through these magnificent works of creative genius from across the Mother Continent and the Black Atlantic, we are given back a prophetic gift, seeing whom we, as individuals and as communities, might yet become.

短名
Journal Impact	0.35
期刊索引	中科院 3 区

ISSN	0001-9933, 1937-2108
h-index	14
国内分区	艺术学(3区)艺术学艺术(4区)

涉及主题	艺术历史地理视觉艺术哲学考古艺术史社会学政治学
出版信息	出版商: MIT Press Journals，出版周期: ，期刊类型: journal，开源期刊: 否
基本数据	创刊年份: 2002，原创研究文献占比: 100.00%，自引率:66.70%， Gold OA占比: 0.00%

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