News Yale 2017 New Location Focus African Art Collection
A new installation of African art at the Yale University Art Gallery presents objects from Africa's earliest cultures along with pieces that inspired modernist artists like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.
Relocated from the gallery's second floor to a more prominent space on the ground level, the installation presents more than than 250 objects, spanning iii,000 years, including sculpture, ceramics, masks, ivory carvings, and metalwork. The objects are arranged by various themes, offering viewers a sense of Africa'south complex and varied artistic traditions.
"We don't attempt to represent all geographic areas," said Barbara Plankensteiner, the Frances and Benjamin Benenson Foundation Curator of African Art, who organized the installation. "Instead, nosotros take arranged the installation thematically to highlight the strengths of the collection and to permit visitors to explore the aesthetics, history, content, and local significance of the works on display."
The new installation, housed in the Laura and James J Ross Gallery of African Fine art, features well-known pieces from the collection too as items that accept rarely been on view.
"Barbara has re-envisioned the collection of African art with an installation that privileges the formal qualities of the objects and opens up windows of possibility for pedagogy and learning," said Pamela Franks, senior deputy director. "The groupings of artworks blend chronology and geography to create conversations around universal themes such every bit motherhood, initiation, creative influence, international trade, and the supernatural, yielding countless new opportunities for appreciation and understanding of the collection's strengths, and of African fine art'due south global connections."
A section on antiquity features sculpture from several cultures arranged chronologically, beginning with v terracotta heads and busts from the Nok culture in Nigeria that date from 900 to 300 B.C.Due east. — among the primeval sculptural art on the continent exterior of Egypt.
Discoveries made during recent archaeological excavations suggest the Nok sculptures were used in burial rituals, Plankensteiner said.
An adjacent section presents objects that demonstrate interconnections among African cultures, as well as ties between African and non-African cultures.
"Galleries traditionally focus on representing Africa as a closed continent with little relations with exterior earth," Plankensteiner said. "There were widespread relations with Asia in the Due east and the Mediterranean to the North, which is reflected in the art on view in this department."
An elaborate Oliphant, a hunting horn carved from an elephant tusk, was produced past artists in Sierra Leone for Portuguese merchants in the 16th century. Its relief carvings depict European hunting scenes.
"We assume that the Portuguese merchants brought woodcuts to prove the local artists imagery that they replicated on the horn," Plankensteiner said.
Other intricately carved ivory tusks on display bear witness Africans in European dress and slaves bound in chains.
Selections of metallic objects fabricated by craftsmen in the Republic of benin Kingdom and the Ijebu Kingdom, both located in southern Nigeria, demonstrate further connections between African artists and Portuguese merchants and betwixt these neighboring cultures.
Close trade relations with Portugal, and later with other European powers, brought unprecedented amounts of contumely into the Benin Kingdom in substitution for pepper, ivory, and slaves. The merchandise fabricated brass an important medium for artists in the royal court, Plankensteiner said.
The gallery's key department examines iconography. A option of female figures, including a large woods figure of a nursing female parent at the gallery'due south entrance, shows the importance that African artists placed on the feminine course, maternity, and fertility.
"The female image is a mutual theme," Plankensteiner said. "Nosotros find that virtually depictions are of young females in their highest country of beauty, showing their readiness for matrimony and to have children."
By contrast, male imagery tended to focus on aggression, ability, and strength, she said. For example, a grave marker for a prominent man in the Bongo civilisation of South Sudan has large notches for every big animal he killed during his lifetime.
A choice of animal masks on display includes images of antelopes, crocodiles, fish, and owls, among other beasts. The masks served a variety of functions, such every bit to teach moral or history lessons, protect communities and ward off evil, or entertain. The imagery was often a metaphor for human behavior, nature, or ancestral spirits, Plankensteiner said.
The local function of the art is explored in another section of the installation. Various pieces related to initiation practices are displayed, including a large trunk mask from Central Africa that was meant to protect initiation sites from evil forces. The mask is big and imposing just has a soft and caring face, which shows the need to protect and nurture the children undergoing initiation, Plankensteiner said.
This section too features objects that relate to religious practices and regal traditions.
The gallery'south final section concerns the history of Yale'south African art collection as well every bit the history of collecting African art in the United States.
Yale's drove of African art, which consists of about ii,000 pieces, began with several gifts of textiles in 1937. The collection received a boost in 1954 with the acquisition of the collection of Ralph Linton, Sterling Professor of Anthropology, purchased every bit a gift past Mr. and Mrs. James Chiliad. Osborn in 1954. Another major milestone occurred in 2004 when Yale acquired every bit a gift the collection of the tardily Charles B. Benenson '33, a real manor developer and passionate fine art collector. Benenson had amassed a world-class collection of nearly 600 objects, which at present form the core of Yale's drove.
A effigy from Benenson's collection of a human seated with a bowl formerly belonged to the Dada artist Tristan Tzara and was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1935 in the influential exhibition "African Negro Art."
"This is an iconic piece for that moment in history," Plankensteiner said of the woods figure, which was produced in Cameroon in the tardily 19thursday century.
That figure, along with others on view, were the kinds of pieces that modernist artists like Picasso had studied while searching for new visual linguistic communication in their art.
"They were not much interested in the content of the fine art but more in the form and the way the man body was depicted, which they so used in their own piece of work," Plankensteiner said. "It was a very of import moment in the development of modern fine art in Europe, and later in the United States."
Collectors, like Benenson, began to acquire the types of pieces that had fascinated and inspired the modernist artists. They still shape people's formulation of African art, Plankensteiner said.
The Yale University Art Gallery, located at 1111 Chapel St. (between York and High), is open to the public free of charge 10 a.one thousand.–5 p.k. Tuesday-Friday; until 8 p.thousand. on Thursdays from September to June; and 11 a.m.–5 p.one thousand. Saturday-Lord's day. Information technology is airtight Mondays and major holidays. For more than information, visit the museum's website.
Source: https://news.yale.edu/2017/01/27/new-location-and-new-focus-yale-s-african-art-collection
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