At Harvard, Images in a Distinctive African Style
In an effort to get Africa into the larger art historical mix at
Harvard, this season the art museums have scheduled three concurrent
exhibitions devoted to African material, old and new. One of them
represents a first-time collaboration with the Peabody Museum. This integration of resources is long overdue for a university
that has the largest Afro- American studies program in the United
States. It also makes timely sense, given a growing public interest
in the hugely diverse stretch of cultural terrain known as "African
art." Numerous exhibitions across the country are being devoted to
various aspects of it this year. And as an art historical field, it
is generating some of the most exciting scholarship around. All three exhibitions at Harvard are modest in size but strong in
concept, in design and in their accompanying publications. They are
organized by young curators with close ties to the university, and
two of the shows are devoted to contemporary African photography, a
category barely noticed in the West before a decade or so ago. "You Look Beautiful Like That: The Portrait Photographs of Seydou
KeĀta and Malick Sidib´" at the Fogg Art Museum showcases work by
two still-active photographers from the West African city of Bamako,
in Mali. A generation apart in age, each helped shape distinctively
African photographic styles. Mr. KeĀta, now in his 70's and with international stature, picked
up the rudiments of the medium from two older Bamako photographers,
Mountaga Dembel´ and the French colonial resident Pierre Garnier. In
1948 he established a local practice making portraits, often in a
postcard-size format. Over the years he has produced thousands of
negatives, most of which are still extant. He did much of his work in controlled outdoor settings, often in
the courtyard of his home. In place of European-style painted
scenes, he used boldly patterned African fabrics, including his own
bedspread, as backdrops. When his subjects wore robes of contrasting
design, the optical clash could be exhilaratingly vibrant. He also
devised flattering poses — in one, a subject is authoritatively
seated, in another she reclines on cushions as if at home — that
added up to a signature style. Also working in Bamako, beginning in the 1960's, was Malick
Sidib´. The pictures for which he has gained attention are his
on-the-spot shots of the city's night life during the heady early
years of national independence, when Western pop music and fashions
transformed the look of urban youth culture. But this change can also be seen in Mr. Sidib´'s wonderful studio
portraits, particularly when they are paired with Mr. KeĀta's, as
they are in the Harvard show, which has been organized by Michelle
Lamuni²re, an assistant curator in the department of photography at
the Fogg. Here, in pictures made some 20 years apart, there are marked
differences in clothing styles, in the sitters' choices of props and
even in body language. At the same time, no firm generational lines
can be drawn: one of Mr. Sidib´'s clients poses with his favorite
sheep, while one of Mr. KeĀta's appears in American hipster attire.
What is certain is that throughout the better part of the 20th
century, both photographers have been creating innovative,
distinctive and immensely stylish modern images of, and for,
Africans. A second exhibition, "Beyond Decorum: The Photography of Ik´ Ud´"
is installed in the Sert Gallery of the Carpenter Center for Visual
Arts, next door to the Fogg. Organized by Mark H. C. Bessire and
Lauri Firstenberg, the show originated at the Maine College of Art
in Portland, where Mr. Bessire is director. But there is a strong
Harvard connection: both curators studied at the university and Ms.
Firstenberg is now a doctoral candidate in its art history
program. Born in Nigeria in 1963, Mr. Ud´ has lived in the United States
since 1981 and he has shaped a versatile career as a photographer,
performer and founding editor of the handsomely designed glossy
magazine called aRude, in which art, fashion, celebrity and attitude
meet. In all of these roles, Mr. Ud´ is essentially a conceptual artist
who combines personal panache with a needle-sharp socio-political
wit. In his series of "Cover Girl" photographs, begun in the
mid-90's, he reworks the covers of international magazines to give
them new content: his version of GQ, for example, features his own
androgynous-looking face and a headline announcing "Conservative
Skirts for the Working Man"; his blood-red Cond´ Nast Traveler cover
has a 19th-century print of a trans-Atlantic slave ship and a
headline reading "The Sardine Pack." In addition to these twists on race and gender, Mr. Ud´ also
deftly plays with a specifically African content. In his "Uli
Portraits" series, nude models are covered with painted patterns,
based on a form of body painting associated with Nigerian Igbo
culture, from which the artist is descended. Similarly, his personal
style, which includes makeup and gender-bending apparel, has sources
in mask performances that include men in female roles. Mr. Ud´'s public persona and his photography are extensions of
each other. Both are physically manipulated, hybrid creations, at
once Western and African, or neither of the two. He's some new kind
of thing in the process of developing. Back at the Fogg, the work in the exhibition "Marking Places:
Spacial Effects of African Art" is closer to familiar notions of
African art. Organized by Kristina Van Dyke, another doctoral
candidate in African art at the university, the show reverses a pet
exhibition theme of recent years: rather than asking how context
affects the meaning of traditional African objects, Ms. Van Dyke
explores ways in which objects shape their environment. Carved Yoruba house posts turn a patch of earth into a royal
enclosure. Intricately woven baskets filled with jewelry transform a
Tutsi home into a high-style House Beautiful. An ornate masquerade
costume transports a dancer symbolically from the earthly to the
spiritual realm. Ms. Van Dyke's subject is broad, poetic and accessible, and she
has given it arresting form, illustrating many of her points with
objects on first-time loan from the Peabody to one of the
neighboring Harvard art museums. Her show will have an extended but
temporary run at the Fogg, as happened with another exhibition of
African art, drawn from the William Teel collection, installed there
a few years ago. When the earlier exhibition went up, there was talk of
establishing a gallery for African art in the Fogg, where it would
join Renaissance sculpture and Impressionist painting, the classics
of Western art. The plan for a permanent space didn't come to pass
at the time. But why can't Ms. Van Dyke's show be regarded as
marking the place for it to happen now?
AMBRIDGE, Mass. — The several buildings and collections
that make up the Harvard University Art Museums encompass riches
beyond count, though the art of Africa isn't among them. Not that
Harvard owns no African art. It owns plenty, but most of it is
housed, as it has been for well over a century, in a separate
on-campus institution, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and
Ethnology, where it stays.
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