In light of the dearth of good quality information on topics related to historical African art on Wikipedia, I met with Kevin to brainstorm ways to approach the task of using our assets to augment existing Wikipedia articles, and write new articles, on these topics. Kevin informed me that he was in the early stages of planning the reinstallation of African Innovations, slated for 2015, which will include focused galleries on individual African cultures.

Edo. Figure of a Hornblower, ca. 1500-1550. Copper alloy, 24 1/2 x 8 1/2 x 6 in. (62.2 x 21.6 x 15.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alastair B. Martin, the Guennol Collection, 55.87. Creative Commons-BY
Image: front, 55.87_front_SL1.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph

I suggested that we use objects from our collection as starting points in thinking about new articles for creation, an approach that runs counter to the prevalent instinct in art historical writing to place the object at the forefront of the text. With this methodology, visual analysis of objects gives way to a deeper understanding of their context and the culture or individual who created them, but the opposite approach must be taken when writing for Wikipedia. In the context of an encyclopedia article, objects must serve to illustrate the text, rather than the other way around. Moreover, Wikipedia’s core policy of “Neutral Point of View” restricts us from interpreting objects in a novel way, or even giving a particularly nuanced description of an object. For example, a Wikipedia article on ancestral altars from Benin would offer context for an object in our collection, a figure of a hornblower that probably stood on such an altar. While contrary to the way we might approach the task of writing about our collections, we recognize that this approach is necessary in order to share objective information with a wider audience.

My first step was to assess the presence and quality of existing Wikipedia articles. An initial search revealed that there are huge gaps in information and the articles that do exist are often of poor quality and riddled with inaccuracies and language that perpetuates misleading stereotypes.  Given the current state of affairs, my two main goals in editing existing articles on topics related to historical African art are 1) to add content from important and highly regarded source material and 2) to replace incorrect information and terminology.

As an example of this type of terminology, let’s consider the word “tribe” or “tribal.” Most scholars who study African states and societies agree that the term “tribe” has no consistent meaning: “It carries misleading historical and cultural assumptions. It blocks accurate views of African realities. At best, any interpretation of African events that relies on the idea of tribe contributes no understanding of specific issues in specific countries. It generalizes a continent’s worth of different social organizations―empires, kingdoms, city-states, autonomous villages, etc―into an overly broad and pejorative term. Indeed, it perpetuates the idea that African identities and conflicts are in some way more ‘primitive’ than those in other parts of the world.” And yet the word is used pervasively in Wikipedia articles on historical African art. If you do a Google search for “Wikipedia African Art,” the second thing to come up is the Wikipedia article on “Tribal Art”; the words “tribe” and “tribal” are used seven times (!) in the general article on African Art.

Three weeks later, I’ve written and edited nearly 20 articles related to the Benin and Yoruba culture groups. It is immensely satisfying to contribute this particular content to Wikipedia, particularly since it is both so rich and so poorly represented on the site.

Throughout the writing and editing process, I am always looking for places to seed our images, which were uploaded en masse to Wikimedia Commons. I did this either to pre-existing articles, to which I would add further research and relevant source material, or to new articles I created. It is exciting to finally make these incredible objects more widely available by inserting their images in a deserving context.

What makes this particular initiative unique is that it came from outside of the institution. When WikiAfrica approached us, it catalyzed an ongoing collaboration that falls directly in line with the Museum’s institutional mission to make our amazing collections available to the widest possible audience, including both visitors who walk through our doors and members of the worldwide community of people interested in art.  We are grateful to WikiAfrica for having brought this fantastic project to our attention.

WikiAfrica’s desire to reach out to us is not surprising given our history as one of the first institutions in the United States to collect and exhibit African material culture as art. Today our collections, numbering more than six thousand pieces, are noted not only for their quality and size but also for the historic role they have played in exposing African art to Americans. The Museum came to assume a leading role in collecting and exhibiting African art primarily through the efforts of its first Curator of Ethnology, Stewart Culin (1858-1929). In 1923, Culin organized the largest exhibition of African art ever assembled. Today, select objects from our collection are displayed in the long-term installation African Innovations.

Our collaboration began with images. We shared our API key  with Wikimedia’s “Share Your Knowledge” project so they could upload our digital image assets to WikiCommons. In six months, they uploaded 3,758 files. Unfortunately, many of these images have not yet been used in articles, which turns out to have a direct correlation to number of views.

Bushoong Kuba. Bwoom Mask, late 19th or early 20th century. Wood, cowrie shells, glass beads, fur, leather, cloth, seed pods, 13 3/4 x 8 1/4 x 12 in. (35 x 21 x 30.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Anne Eisner Putnam Collection, 73.178. Creative Commons-BY

Whether or not an image has been “seeded” (or placed in a corresponding article) has a significant effect on how many people view that image. An image of our Bwoom Mask serves as a striking example of this effect. Standing alone in its uploaded state on Wikimedia Commons, the image received 334 page views within a three month period. Once a Wikipedia user seeded the image in an article about the Kuba Kingdom, the article was viewed 4,942 times within the same period. In other words, the Kuba Kingdom article received 15 times the number of views than the Bwoom Mask image. While some of the 3,758 images uploaded by WikiAfrica have been seeded, the vast majority have not. To be precise, as of this month, 97 of the uploaded  images have been used on French Wikipedia, and 70 on English Wikipedia.

However, I realized that there was often no place (or no good place, I should say) to seed these images―there were very few articles of adequate quality that addressed topics related to these objects, and those that did exist were either incomplete or full of false information, or both. The Kuba Kingdom article is a good example. The article offers only 750 words about one of the most powerful and culturally productive kingdoms in African history, and yet over 10,000 people have looked at that article since December. That signifies 10,000 opportunities to expand someone’s understanding of the incredibly rich history and cultural heritage of pre-colonial Africa. That fact alone is a call to action if I’ve ever seen one.

This leads us to my current project augmenting Wikipedia articles on topics related to historical African art, which I will cover in next week’s post.

Fifty books, periodical articles and other primary documents have been received from this major donation and several items are now featured in the Library Display Cases at the entrance of the Museum Library. On display are rare books such as the catalog for the seminal exhibition entitled The Negro artist comes of age; a national survey of contemporary American artists which was held at the Brooklyn Museum in 1945. According to the Brooklyn Museum Bulletin (November 1945, No. 2), the exhibition consisted of fifty-three paintings and nine sculptures “by the leading young Negro artists of the United States. A few of these, such as Jacob Lawrence and Horace Pippin, have been widely shown but the work of the large majority is only now beginning to be recognized as an integral segment of our native art.”

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The Camille and Luther Clark donation has greatly enhanced the Brooklyn Museum Library’s documentation on African American art and we are honored to have these important research materials here.

To conclude our series, I would like to share one final work. Red Escape II, by Viyé Diba, a Senegalese artist who lives and works in Dakar, is a brand-new acquisition, making its debut in African Innovations. The work was purchased as a joint acquisition by Eugenie and me, on behalf of both the African and Contemporary collections. Thus, it may also find its way into a Contemporary collection rotation at some point in the future.

Viyé Diba (Senegalese, born 1954). Red Escape II, 1999. Cotton strip cloth, paint, sand, wood, metal , 67 x 55 in. (170.2 x 139.7 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Elliot Picket, by exchange and Alfred T. White Fund, 2011.30. © artist or artist's estate. Photo by Bonnie Morrison.

The painting itself is composed entirely of materials Diba found in Dakar, making the accumulated hands that previously touched these materials part of the work’s story. The piece of painted yellow wood, projecting between the seams of this woven canvas, and the abstract forms that suggest fleeing figures at the top, all evoke the possibility of liberation—from the plane of the canvas, from the strictures of either painting or sculpture or, perhaps, from the history of Dakar itself, a former minor way station in the odious historical trade in human captives.

While currently the only significant abstract contemporary work in the African collection, in its materials and surfaces Red Escape II evokes the centuries of more figurative creative expression that came before it. With its themes of community and freedom, it offers a fitting coda to African Innovations.

Elvis Mask for Nyau Society, ca. 1977. Wood, paint, fiber, cloth, Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. J. Gordon Douglas III, Frederick E. Ossorio, and Elliot Picket, by exchange and Designated Purchase Fund, 2010.41

Brooklyn’s Elvis is a ceremonial mask of the Nyau Society of the Chewa peoples, who reside primarily in central Malawi.  The Nyau is a secret society that creates these masks for inclusion in ritualistic dances as part of initiation ceremonies, chief coronations and funerals. The masks often represent revered ancestral and animal spirits.  They also have satirical themes and occasionally depict famous foreigners as a means to provide education on social and cultural values. This unique incarnation of a western cultural icon highlights a fascinating interaction between western and non-western societies.

The mask is hand carved from a single piece of wood with the eyes, mouth and nostrils pierced through. The face is painted with a thick application of pink paint. Synthetic hair defines Elvis’ characteristic pompadour hairstyle and sideburns as well as the eyes and eyebrows.  Various textiles and burlap are attached around the neck.

Acquired by the Museum in 2010, Elvis wasn’t quite ready for the spotlight.  The hair had been infested with insects, painted areas were dirty and flaking, and the textiles, believed to be original to the mask, were in tatters.

Upon its arrival in the conservation lab, the mask was monitored to determine that live insects were not present, and then it was thoroughly groomed to remove old insect casings and debris. Painted surfaces were lightly cleaned and stabilized.  The textiles around the neck were reconstructed and secured around the bottom edge of the mask by stitching the original textile to a support backing of nylon netting—the same netting textile conservators use to stabilize our mummy collection.  The netting provides support for the original fabric without altering the appearance.

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The conservation of Elvis highlights how conservators approach the treatment of many ethnographic objects.  The mask was not restored to what it may have looked like when it was first made.  Instead, it was conserved to reflect the history of its use and to make it stable enough to be exhibited safely without further deterioration.

Elvis will be a featured in African Innovations opening August 12th—just in time for the 34th anniversary of the Elvis’ death.  So if you can’t make it to Graceland this year, stop by the Brooklyn Museum.

Overskirt. Unidentified Kuba artist, late 19th or early 20th century. West Kasai province, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Raffia, pigment. Purchased with funds given by Frieda and Milton F. Rosenthal, 1991. 72

However, textiles also present considerable challenges from the point of view of design and conservation. They tend to require a considerable amount of space (at a premium in this installation), and can only be exposed to light for a limited period of time before needing to be rotated out and returned to storage. For a number of reasons, showing the strengths of Brooklyn’s African textile collection was not in the cards, this time around.

Constraints (to mangle a phrase) can sometimes be the mother of invention, however, and we’ve come up with a new means of presenting the variety of African textile design to our visitors, without sacrificing space or museum objects. African Innovations will instead contain a wall of “touch textiles.” These are mid-to-late 20th century examples of textile genres from around the continent, generously donated by a handful of local collectors, which will be installed in a manner that will permit visitors to feel, as well as see, the variety and ingenuity of African fabric work.

This was a really fun portion of the installation on which to work, as this idea allowed us more flexibility than would be otherwise possible in working with museum objects. I was fortunate to have a wide variety of fabrics from which to select.

We ultimately decided to show 16 different examples of “touch textiles”—ranging from machine-printed kangas from East Africa to bark cloth from the Congolese forests and bogolan (mud cloth) from Mali—in a grid pattern, on one wall of the “Arts of the Self” section. Once I had selected our final 16, Matthew contacted a neighborhood tailor to cut and hem the samples to size.

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I hope you’ll have a chance to come and enjoy some (limited) museum rule-breaking and “please, touch!” our textile wall, once African Innovations opens at the end of next week.

Installation in progress.

Through a series of discussions and plans with Matthew, our Chief Designer, I have come to see that openness as one of the most exciting features of the new layout (instead of a problem to be overcome). The African Innovations galleries will be visible from many different angles within the Great Hall, and will allow visitors to move between the two spaces with ease, while still creating a number of separate galleries within the new installation.

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The design cleverly use of a series of diagonal walls, aligned with the existing architecture of the building, to create seven distinct spaces within the installation, for each of the exhibition’s themes. These mini-galleries have the benefit of organizing related works in close proximity, while still drawing upon the openness of the original space.

If you’ve been to the museum in the last month, you have been able to watch this process play out in the open, at least in part. In that same spirit, here are a few “behind-the-scenes” shots to fill you in on parts of the construction and re-installation process that have been less visible.

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Construction that will soon be bringing further major changes to the first floor necessitated moving the African galleries from their current home. Faced with a big move, I jumped at the opportunity to put a new spin on one of our most beloved and important collections.

Three-Headed Figure (Sakimatwemtwe). Unidentified Lega artist, 19th century, South Kivu or Maniema province, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Wood, fiber, kaolin. Museum Expedition 1922, Robert B. Woodward Memorial Fund, 22.486

Consisting of over 200 objects in a wide variety of media and genres, including a significant number of works not previously on view, African Innovations aims to build on our groundbreaking history of collecting and exhibiting African art, while moving towards new methods of display and interpretation for the 21st century. The signature work , a three-headed figure (sakimatwemtwe) by an unidentified Lega artist, is emblematic of the theme—with one large head rooted in its own 19th century moment, its additional faces might be said to be looking both back toward the past, and ahead to the future.

African Innovations will arrange the museum’s African galleries chronologically for the first time, to emphasize the continent’s long record of creativity, adaptation, and artistic achievement.

My aim is to emphasize how African art was created to solve important artistic, social, political, and cosmological problems. In so doing, it is my hope that you will further appreciate the works on view as creative solutions with a long history of formal and functional change. I wanted to move away from a primarily geographic presentation that suggested a comparatively static ‘ethnographic present.’

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Instead, African Innovations will open and close with galleries focusing on “Crossroads Africa.” The first display, beginning in ancient times, establishes Africa’s ongoing history of artistic dialogue with other parts of the world and neighboring cultures, while the last extends this story into the present (and creates Brooklyn’s first dedicated space for contemporary African art). Highlights of the exhibition range from our Nok head, created as early as 550 _B.C.E. to Vessel, by Magdalene Odundo, from 1990. Intriguingly, both our earliest African work and one of our latest were both made from a coiling pottery technique—how’s that for continuity and innovation!?

Skipping Girl. Yinka Shonibare MBE (British, b. 1962). London, United Kingdom, 2009. Life-size fiberglass mannequin, Dutch-wax printed cotton, mixed media. Gift of Edward A. Bragaline and purchase gift of William K. Jacobs, Jr., by exchange and Mary Smith Dorward Fund, 2010.8. © Yinka Shinobare MBE

African Innovations also offers me the opportunity to showcase a number of new acquisitions, such as Skipping Girl, by Yinka Shonibare, whose form evokes the layers of historical connections between European, Asian and African cultures and reveals the constructed nature of “authenticity.”

I’ll leave the other new acquisitions as surprises for the opening in August. Watch this space later this month for further updates on new features in the installation and insights into the construction and design process.

Despite the considerable geographic distance between them, the Loma and the Senufo share not only a similarly named institution in the form of Poro, but also a genre of ‘horizontal’ wooden masks used for their generally protective and law enforcement capacities. Brooklyn has a number of wonderfully potent examples, some of which have (regrettably) not been on view for some time.

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Extending our reach even slightly further (and in response to an influential question posed in the 1990s in an African art journal—Is there history in horizontal masks?), there is an intriguing case to be made for connections to more well-known horizontal masks in Brooklyn’s collection that have long been on view, and will return later this summer in our new African Innovations re-installation (more on that very soon).

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Both the Banda mask, by a Baga artist, and the Komo mask, by a Bamana artist, suggest intriguing visual and functional parallels with the Loma Ngafui mask in New Orleans.

Maybe next season?