Creative Africa (review)

In the catalogue essay for his 2006 exhibition Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (Göttingen: Steidl, 2006), Okwui Enwezor highlighted the pervasiveness of Afro-Pessimism in the media. Ten years later, the term has been roundly banished from the vocabulary and vision of “Creative Africa.” This series of five tightly curated exhibitions celebrating historical and contemporary artistic production from the African continent was on view during the summer 2016 season at the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building. Despite a typically monolithic treatment of a generalized Africa in the show’s title, the programming and exhibitions themselves provided nuanced and thoughtful insights into a diverse range of creative pursuits from the continent, including historical arts, photography, architecture, design, fashion, and dance. Though four of the exhibitions were organized separately by Philadelphia Museum curators, including Peter Barberie, Kathryn Bloom Hiesinger, Dilys Blum, H. Kristina Haugland, and John Vick, all were informed by consulting curator Kristina Van Dyke’s commitment to the idea that art, no matter the origin, is an expression of what it means to be human.

African art is not a primary collecting area for the Philadelphia Museum, but they have previously hosted important exhibitions of African art, including “African Art, African Voices: Long Steps Never Broke a Back” in 2004, organized by Seattle Art Museum curator Pamela McClusky. While “Long Steps” sought to recontextualize historical African art for visitors, “Look Again: Contemporary Perspectives on African Art” (Fig. 1), the central and largest show in “Creative Africa,” argued for the primacy of the African art object in itself. “Look Again” curator and independent scholar Kristina Van Dyke, formerly of the Menil Collection and more recently Director of the Pulitzer Foundation, believes in the discipline of African art history and of the merits and validity of close looking and formal analysis. Organized around a series of questions that prompt visitors to look closely and think deeply about the objects from West and Central Africa on view, the exhibition takes as its central conceit that anyone can engage with works of African art. Presented in white cube style with blue dividing walls that partitioned the gallery like stretches of minimalist sky or sea, “Look Again” prioritized the perception of these objects as works of art.

Guiding questions incorporated in wall text loosely grouped the objects on view according to qualities like material, form, function, process, and ornamentation. Given room to breathe and space for contemplation alone and in groups, power figures from the Kongo Kingdom read as both sculpture and document, as objects authored by multiple individuals. Questions such as “What happens when an artist combines different types of objects?” led visitors to push past the potentially opaque (anti-) aesthetic choices behind bundled power objects from Central Africa to understand their ability to harness and concentrate the power of the natural world. Others, like “How do materials influence what an artist makes?” compelled visitors to consider the constraints under which the artist worked or the reasons why an object looks as it does. Though I overheard the exhibition described as “like walking through a textbook,” I would consider such a designation to its credit. Rather than overly prescribed or pedantic, I found the show’s text-heavy didactics to be stimulating and useful tools as a teacher, curator, and historian of African art.

Because of the often violent conditions of their initial collection during the colonial period, we frequently know precious little about historical African art objects. Van Dyke did not shy away from this fact. Drawn almost exclusively from the extensive holdings of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (the Penn Museum), the installation brought attention to these moments of rupture in objects’ histories, asking “How did these works come to be in Philadelphia?” When little is known about the artist, facture, use, or original context, as is the case with the bronze plaques and heads initially seized and then sold by the British during the Benin Punitive Expedition of 1897, the objects are indispensable records themselves, as discussed in a...