Art of Central Africa at the Indianapolis Museum of Art

In honor of Theodore Celenko

In terms of arts and entertainment, Indianapolis, Indiana, is known for its automobile race, its International Violin Competition, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields (IMA). African art scholars and aficionados alike associate the city and its museum specifically with businessman and philanthropist Harrison Eiteljorg (1903–1997), the namesake of the museum's suite of African art galleries (Fig. 1). To this day, his vast collection, mostly donated in 1989, constitutes the bulk of the museum's more than 1,700 African holdings, making it among the largest of its kind in the country and one of the few truly encyclopedic African collections anywhere in the world (Figs. 2–3).¹ Thanks to his vision and the efforts of the museum's longtime (and now emeritus) curator Theodore (Ted) Celenko, it collected and exhibited the arts of northern Africa and contemporary African art long before many other museums or private collectors (see jegede 2000). As a result, these two areas, as well as the often equally underrated arts of eastern and southern Africa, are exceptionally well represented. Due largely to the accomplishments of its curator of textile and fashion arts, Niloo Paydar, the museum also has a strong reputation for its comprehensive collection of African textiles, administratively housed in another department.

It has often been said that Eiteljorg regularly benefited from the advice of Indiana University professor Roy Sieber (1923–2001), a leading authority in the field and an influential mentor to many. But the true nature of Sieber's role in forming the Eiteljorg Collection has not been fully studied, and therefore it cannot be ascertained which acquisitions Sieber actually supported. However, as he himself pointed out in an article on the collection in this journal, Celenko did impact "Eiteljorg's orientation and level of seriousness" (Celenko 1981: 32). From his beginnings as Eiteljorg's private curator in 1978 until his retirement on March 31, 2009, after nearly twenty years as the Indianapolis Museum of Art's curator of the Arts of Africa, the South Pacific, and the Americas, Celenko steered the collection to its current constitution.² Still, many important works in the museum's African collection pre- and postdate the Eiteljorg gifts, and some of the collection's most prized possessions were purchased during the last decade before Celenko retired, including the ex-Susan Vogel Senufo display figure (1999.31; see Robbins and Nooter 1989: 121, no. 169; Lee 2005: 70) and the ex-Carlo Monzino Songye power figure (2005.21), which I discuss later.

RANKING THE IMA'S AFRICAN ART COLLECTION

My impetus for writing this essay was my engagement as the Mellon Curator-at-Large for African Art at the IMA from July 1, 2014, to October 1, 2015. Appointed by Charles L. Venable, the Indianapolis museum's Melvin & Bren Simon Director and CEO, I served as one of six nonresident curators of various art historical specialties in this ambitious and innovative curatorial pilot program supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which was initiated in November 2011 and ended in June 2017. Through the Mellon curatorial program, the IMA was able to draw on the expertise of specialists in areas where in-house curatorial oversight was lacking, including Chinese, South Asian, Native American, African, American, and Japanese art. All Mellon curators, typically hired on a rotating basis for one-year tenures, have benefited from the expert assistance of Kirstin Krause Gotway, now undertaking PhD studies in art history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

1.

Harrison Eiteljorg amidst his African collection at his Indianapolis residence, c. 1985.

In line with a museum-wide assessment project, chief among the tasks assigned to me were the ranking of the collection according to quality and the updating of catalogue data accompanying the works identified as of the highest ranks, to support further research and the ultimate publication of a scholarly catalogue of collection highlights. On a more practical level...