African Art: A Century at the Brooklyn Museum, and: Sogo Bò: The Animals Come Forth. Malian Puppets and Masks from the Collection of Mary Sue and Paul Peter Rosen (review)

These two volumes, written by eminent African art historians who also have extensive backgrounds in ethnology, present contrasting collections and the traditions that they reflect. Serving as curator of African and Oceanic art at the Brooklyn Museum from 1987 through 2007, William C. Siegmann brought impressive credentials to his curatorship of the museum's vast collections, including ten years of residence in Liberia, where he served as director of the National Museum and taught at Cuttington University. Mary Jo Arnoldi is now curator of African art and ethnology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, where in 1999 she mounted the now famous "African Voices" exhibition. One interesting connection between the two authors is that before coming to the Brooklyn Museum, Siegmann served as curator of the African Art Museum in Tenafly, New Jersey, where he designed the space that recently housed the "Sogo Bò" exhibition that is the subject of Arnoldi's book.

In African Art: A Century at the Brooklyn Museum, Siegmann presents selected examples from the museum's impressive collection of some six thousand objects. These come from diverse sources, were collected over the course of a century, and primarily represent African cultural traditions that are now extinct. By contrast, in Sogo Bò: The Animals Come Forth, Arnoldi presents recently acquired objects from the collection of Mary Sue and Paul Peter Rosen that represent a vibrant and continuing cultural tradition among four population groups in Mali. Sogo Bò celebrates an exhibition of ninety-five Malian puppets that was on view from March 2009 to January 2010 at the African Art Museum of the SMA Fathers in Tenafly, New Jersey.

The Siegmann volume was not published in conjunction with an exhibition. Rather, it documents and memorializes the Brooklyn Museum's African art holdings and the history of how and when they were collected. In the first section, titled "A Collection Grows in Brooklyn," Siegmann details the fascinating history of the birth and development of the museum's African art collection, which began in 1900 with the acquisition of baskets, fiber hats, and clay pipes from the Kongo peoples of the Belgian Congo. Stewart Culin (1858–1929), the museum's first curator of ethnology (of whom Siegmann notes, "No curator . . . has had a more profound impact on the entire history of the Brooklyn Museum" [11]), assembled the 1923 exhibition "Primitive Negro Art, Chiefly from the Belgian Congo," displaying almost fifteen hundred works; it is still the largest exhibition of African art ever mounted, noteworthy not only because of its size, but more important, because of Culin's emphasis on aesthetics and the formal qualities of the pieces displayed. As a result, the exhibition received widespread coverage in the popular press.

In his fascinating introduction, Siegmann details the subsequent history of the collection, which has grown to some six thousand objects, making it the largest such collection in an art museum in the United States. It includes textiles, ceramics, jewelry, masks, and figures from more than fifty cultures, with materials from Central Africa forming its greatest strength. This volume highlights some 130 objects from this vast collection, organized into seven geographic areas, with brief introductory essays and maps depicting various cultural groups. The objects are mostly illustrated in color on the right-hand pages, with field photographs of similar objects in use shown on the opposite pages; each object is...