Heroes: Principles of African Greatness by Kevin Dumouchelle (review)

A longstanding challenge of curating African art is connecting traditional objects with audiences more attuned to the spectacle of the contemporary. To that African art historians must add an additional challenge: The vast territorial and historical scope of the continent and the colonial legacies of many collections further complicate the presentation of such material in the staid context of the museum. This latter problem, of course, was at the heart of Frederick Lamp’s See the Music, Hear the Dance: Rethinking African Art at the Baltimore Museum of Art over fifteen years ago, which sought to resituate sculptural and decorative art in the rich haptic and sonic contexts in which it was conceived (Lamp 2004). The ongoing exhibition Heroes: Principles of African Greatness does a similar kind of work, adding new layers of interpretation and context to art from the past two centuries (Fig. 1).

Heroes, curated by Kevin Dumouchelle, opened at the National Museum of African Art on November 16, 2019. It features work by forty artists from fifteen countries and uses an array of multimedia strategies to connect with a broad audience. The show’s aim is to remind viewers of African excellence in its myriad forms—in this case, ideals and the leaders who embody them.

As the exhibition’s press release notes, “it invites viewers to consider the core values of leadership—justice, integrity, generosity, and empathy—embodied in the art. [Each work] … is paired with a historic African person, a ‘hero in history,’ who embodies the thematic value shown in the artwork” (NMAfA 2019: 1).

In so doing, Dumouchelle, who joined the NMAfA in 2016, has installed works from the museum’s collection in a dazzling, provocative way. Pairing the classical with the contemporary, he and the Smithsonian team engage audiences with an interactive digital app, a lively playlist piped in to the museum’s atrium (available on Spotify), and splashy fonts and bold graphics for the wall text. Taken together, such strategies yield an immersive and playful experience that draws audiences of all ages into a dense survey of aesthetic and political history.

Curatorially, Heroes seems to be looking in a few directions. One reference, at least implicitly, is toward recent writing and installations by critic Hilton Als, who has brought mid-century figures such as Alice Neel and James Baldwin to the fore by elaborating their creative interlocutors both past and present. Als’s criticism seeks out “Black excellence” at a time when African and diasporic peoples are again the focus of xenophobic rhetoric and, often, brutal policies (see, for example, Kraft 2019; Als 2017). Dumouchelle’s exhibition, too, emphasizes modes of excellence, and its story is told through the lens of the “heroes”—both artistic and political—who exemplify, for instance, beauty, collectivity, empowerment, style, victory, and, indeed, wokeness. Importantly, women figure prominently in what could have easily been a rehash of a “great men” version of recent history. The heroes here range from leaders of the independence era to, for instance, Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee, whose photograph appears as a small badge next to a mid-twentieth century Dan ceremonial spoon (artist unknown).

1.

Heroes: Principles of African Greatness, exhibition promotional image.

Photo: courtesy National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution

2.

Nelson Mandela Limestone Quarry (2002) Pastel on paper

Photo: Brad Simpson, courtesy National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution

Other leaders evoked in Heroes are more predictable, from Black nationalist leader Malcolm X to Ghanaian luminary Kwame Nkrumah. Indeed, the exhibition is, in many respects, a roll call of mid-twentieth century icons who came to prominence during a time of explicit anticolonial struggle and nascent nation-statism. This is fitting, as a search of the hashtag associated with promotional material (#africanheroes), yields encomia to figures such as Amilcar Cabral and Patrice Lumumba. In this sense, a second curatorial precedent for Heroes is the late Okwui Enwezor...