The de-installed former Arts of the Islamic World gallery, May 2013.

We will do our best to keep you updated about the project and how it will affect movement around the Museum with signage. We have already cleared all objects from the former Arts of the Islamic World gallery, and soon you’ll get a behind-the-scenes peek at the project. Objects from the two collections will be on view on storage shelves in that space starting in mid-June. During the first phase of construction, you will be able to walk through this storage area while the adjacent galleries are dark.

This large-scale reinstallation project has also allowed us to collaborate with the Rubin Museum of Art. Museum-goers can see highlights of Asian art from Brooklyn across the East River in the exhibition From India East: Sculptures of Devotion from the Brooklyn Museum, which runs through July 14, 2014. We hope that you will head to Chelsea to learn more about the development of Buddhist and Hindu art across Asia during our temporary closure of the galleries here.

From India East is on view at the Rubin Museum through July 7, 2014 and features Brooklyn Museum objects.

More to come as our opening date gets closer, but we are looking forward to the new galleries. We hope to bring out objects from storage that we couldn’t show in the current galleries, such as Southeast Asian bronzes that require climate control, Japanese scrolls that are too long for the current casework, and an increased number of works on paper from across Asia and the Middle East. It’s a busy but exciting time in my department!

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.

To give the designer, Lance Singletary, a sense of what I imagined, I picked up a couple of paint swatches from the hardware store and he took it from there. I can’t stress enough how important these conversations with the designer are, because if Lance didn’t “get” what kind of vision I had for the space, it would have ended up looking a lot different than what you’re about to see in this video. He will explain how he came up with the subtle details that make for an extraordinary change on a relatively modest budget. It’s been an intense project that came together in an incredibly short period of time, thanks to the help of a whole team of people— curatorial staff, conservators, editors, designers, painters, electricians, art handlers, maintenance staff, technology staff, the security staff who kept an eye on me on many a late night at the museum, and more (I really hope I haven’t overlooked anyone here!). Ultimately, though, you will have to come see for yourself when the galleries open to the public on June 5, 2009—in the meantime, check out this “behind-the-scenes” video of some of the reinstallation: