Art Fair 2015

Ibrahim, seller of West and Central African Art

Mr. B's always popular piano music, which travels on a special bicycle cart.

African Art at the American Museum of Natural History

African masks at the Museum of Natural History

African Elephant in the hall of African animals

My Art Fair, Ann Arbor, 2014

Ibrahim's Booth

Last week was the Ann Arbor Art Fair, a madhouse of art and commercial selling of all sorts of merchandise, snacks, bottled water, tee-shirts, and more that extends throughout the downtown area and on campus. I spent a few hours walking around there by myself on Wednesday when it opened, and more on Thursday evening with friends. The "original" fair, which began 52 years ago, was formerly at the south side of campus. It's now on the campus near the Carl Milles fountain and the Michigan League. And it's always my favorite. This year I saw many appealing booths there, belonging to artists in glass, ceramics, clothing, photography, painting, hand-woven straw hats, jewelry, and more.

My only purchase was from Ibrahim, a dealer in african masks, who rents some space from the owner of a shop just outside the fair. He has no official designation, he just drives in and sets up where  he has a space. I have purchased masks from  him in previous years, and I admire his selection of high-quality wood carvings from many African tribes. I believe that he travels to Africa to obtain his wares.

Masks on my living room wall. The two small ones are this year's purchase.

Our new masks come from the same area as the existing mask above them. Ibrahim says they are "passport masks," that is, carried as identification of the person's membership in a particular tribe or group. Many tribes create small masks for various personal use. They can be amulets to protect hunters, they might be kept secret in one's home, or might be worn on one's arm to show affiliations.

All three masks have a central bird figure above the face. In the new mask to the right, the bird leans over, and its beak also forms the nose of the mask. This identifies them as coming from Ivory Coast, from the Guro division of the Senufo people. We suspect that our masks were used in a village because their interiors smell strongly but pleasantly of wood smoke, as if they have been near a campfire, but neither the interiors nor the beautifully finished exteriors show any signs of burning. Of course this is only a guess.

For more information on the mask we've owned for a while, see this blog post that I did when we bought that mask.

Masks

Baule Mask, Ivory Coast
Chicago Institute of Arts 

Lega Mask, Congo
Chicago Institute of Arts

Northwest American Native Masks
Field Museum 

New Guinea Men's House Masks
Field Museum

I love tribal masks. Here are a few that I found appealing on my museum visits this past weekend.

African Reading and Art

"Group Photo 1987," wood sculpture by El Anatsui

King Peggy,  recently featured on CNN, leads a village in Ghana

El Anatsui is a multi-media artist from Ghana, who lives in Nigeria. An exhibit of his works titled "When I Last Wrote to You about Africa" at our local art museum includes wooden sculptures, large wall hangings made from the foil caps of whiskey bottles and other found objects, paintings, ceramic sculptures, prints, and installations in various media. Many of the works relate to life in African cities and towns familiar to the artist.

Some of Anatsui's works are representational and some are more abstract; I found all of them beautiful and fascinating. One large work, "Akua's Surviving Children" (which I didn't get an image of) was made from driftwood, and represented the slaves who had left the country. I also enjoyed the wood sculptures of people titled "Group Photo 1987."

The vivid and modern interpretations of life in Ghana and Nigeria, represented in a completely modern and (I think) western European artistic mode, connected in my mind to two things I have read in the past week.

For one thing,  CNN ran a feature on a woman who lives in Washington, D.C., and works as a secretary, but who was chosen by the town Otuam, a fishing village on the coast of her native country Ghana, to be their king. In Otuam, "king" is the traditional title for the ruler, man or woman. The photos and videos with this story showed King Peggy in her vivid robes of office and  crown. In fact, she explained, she owned several crowns!

King Peggy's 7000 people are quite poor, and she has raised money to bring them clean water and an ambulance, and seems to be engaged in other ways of raising their standard of living. They seem to adore her (I hope CNN is telling the truth) and they carry her on a palanquin with a huge umbrella. "In the last few years, she's helped poor families pay school fees for their children and brought computers to classrooms. With the help of other Americans she's also provided Otuam with its first ambulance, as well as access to clean, running water. Her next priority, she says, is to bring state-of-the-art toilets to Otuam."

Amos Tutuola's folk-like tale The Palm-Wine Drinkard has long been one of my favorite African stories. By coincidence, last week I also read a new Kindle edition of some shorter tales that he wrote, "Don't Pay Bad for Bad." The stories take place in Yoruba villages in Nigeria, and are told, according to a preface by Tutuola's son, in an English very much influenced by the idioms of the Yoruba language. His son points out that over his life, Tutuola was both admired and criticized for his fusion of African and English themes and idioms, and that in his later works (which I haven't read) he tried to make his language more conventional.

Village market places, village kings, and relationships among the villagers are central to these stories. Some of them are fables with a moral, like the title story "Don't Pay Bad for Bad," in which a jealous woman tricks another woman, who plots for years to pay her back -- but her revenge is so cruel that she simply gives it up. Famine stalks one village, but an individual finds supernatural beings who will help him on promise of secrecy; of course the secret is discovered by a trickster who is up to no good. The need for food and fear of hunger are very important in these tales, which connects them in my mind to the depictions of market themes in Anatsui.

El Anatsui wall hanging made from bottle caps,
which reminded me of a work by Klimt

I think the artist Anatsui is much more in control of the level of his work, and of his choices to connect to both European (or American) and African visual idioms. Materials like shiny whiskey bottle caps and depictions of slave themes obviously intentionally show the multiple connections in modern village and town life. The artist's creation of beauty from other people's trash speaks to me of a variety of ideas about modern life and village or town life, as well as about the marketplace in a wider sense. Here's an article titled "Art from Bottle Tops" that describes his methods and shows closeups of how he uses them.

Hundreds of metal boxes made by tinkers.
Title "Open(ing) Market"

One large installation of little metal boxes titled "Open(ing) Market" suggests how a market might indicate both local and wide-ranging commerce and connections. Composed of hundreds of brightly-colored little boxes and one or two large ones, and displayed on a wide stretch of the floor, it's quite impressive. Closer up, the boxes are painted with various designs; according to the documentation the metal work was done by local tinkers. Inside each box is a label from a can or package of commodity food like Starkist Tuna. I thought about many markets. An open-air market of an African village far from everywhere, a modern supermarket, or the abstract "market" in which  global trade and commerce take place.

El Anatsui exhibit:
on the floor, a ceramic sculpture
on the far wall, wooden plates carved by artisans and decorated by the artist

African Art: Heads and Masks

I have often written about African masks and why I find them so interesting and appealing. At our recent visit to the St. Louis Art Museum, I made it a point to look at the African collection, and to try to read some of the notes available about the items there. Africa is a huge continent with a wide variety of cultures and peoples, a long history, and much that's been lost, but much more that's preserved in what I see as a rather mysterious state.

The three heads shown above and in detail at left, for example, are 18th or 19th century post-mortem portraits of upper-class individuals from Ashan, Ghana, in a tradition that European visitors observed from the 17th to 20th centuries, according to the accompanying documentation. The heads would be displayed outside the village, where they would be "periodically visited and honored." I wonder what that meant, and what the heads meant to the people in the villages. These little hints never quite present as much as I wish they would.

"Our knowledge of African antiquity is still developing," explains one general-information placard. "The existing material record reveals cultures that produced sophisticated and compelling explorations of the human condition. ... The Sahel, a horizontal band stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea just south of the Sahara, has a long history as a trading nexus of goods, peoples, and ideas. Over the course of the first millenium BC, the region developed rice cultivation, sub-Saharan Africa's earliest cities, and important iron-producing centers."

Each area of Africa, each set of people, each river valley -- all seem to have equally long and complex histories, yet most museums have only a small number of artifacts that represent an entire people's history, and rarely are there really old items -- the St. Louis museum has a few of them, but I didn't photograph them. Below are a few pictures of other masks and sculptures of heads in the museum.

The museum does not have the name of the artists for a single one of these heads and masks, though they do seem to know the names of the rites or the special ceremonial societies for which the masks were used. For example, the Suku mask below was made for initiation ceremonies, during which young boys from a village learned about farming and hunting. The mask personified village ancestors, according to the label.

Mende Mask, Sierra Leone, Early 20th C.

Baule Mask, Je Society, Cote d'Ivoire, Early 20th C.

Suku Mask, Congo, Late 19th C.

African World Festival, Detroit

Our new African Mask: A "Sickness Mask"from the Congo

This afternoon we walked around the sales booths for the African World Festival, sponsored by the Detroit Museum of African American History. The festival will present a number of events tomorrow, but we just happened to be there today. We went to Detroit to see an exhibit of five Spanish paintings by Velazquez, Picasso, Dali, ElGreco, and Goya at the Detroit Institute of Arts across the street.

The festival was quiet, but very colorful. I'm sure it will become much more crowded as the weekend progresses, and I'm glad we were there at a calm time.








Several of the many booths offered a wide selection of African masks and other traditional wood carvings, both antique and modern. We bought our new mask from Billo Berete of Newark, N.J. -- below, Len in the booth:





There were many other masks in this booth, including two more Sickness Masks, as shown above. As I understand it, sickness masks are characterized by asymmetry, contrasting colors on opposite sides of the face or double faces, and sometimes by anguished looks. The mask at left in the middle was an extremely wonderful piece, made not only of wood but also mud, seeds, and cloth. It's probably more authentic than the one we bought, but it was too vivid for my taste. It made me anxious!

For more information on Sickness Masks, including images, see the second half of my July, 2009, post "Why do I like African Masks?"

More Afro-Caribbean Carvings

Above the entrance to one of the bars at Anse Chastanet in St.Lucia is a memorable wood carving by Lawrence Deligny, whose work we purchased -- see Afro-Caribbean Mask from St.Lucia my post from earlier today. The images from the life of Samson in the Bible are vivid -- on our first visit to St.Lucia years ago, I watched a wood carver creating an image of Samson with dreadlocks, and he told me that allowing ones hair to grow -- as the Rastamen do -- was related to the Samson story. The bars and restaurants are decorated with many more carvings by Deligny and another artist who works in brightly painted wood.

Afro-Caribbean Mask from St.Lucia

This is the mask we brought back -- it's over 4 feet tall. We like the way it goes with our other African masks, which I wrote about here: About the New Masks and Our African Masks

The name of the artist is Lawrence Deligny, and other works of his are on display at Anse Chastenet where we stayed.

African Arts in Bloomington IN

Makonde Mask

Baule Mask

Kube Embroidered Cloth

Senufo Mask

From the Toledo Museum

We began our visit to the Toledo Art Museum with the early 20th century, and I was quite taken with the similarity of this Brancusi head to African heads. I have the impression that although the museum has a small collection, every item is a masterpiece. The arrangement and documentation of the works is remarkably well done. For example, the single room of African art (which we were heading for) is in between two rooms with early 20th century artists.

Many museums have questions for thought on the panels describing a work: here, I often thought they were good questions that I would actually like to think about. Frequently at other museums, I feel the writers are insulting my intelligence.

Baule Gold Pendant, Ivory Coast

Palm Wine Cup, Kuba people, Congo

The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutola is a great book, which I read a long time ago. The "drinkard" is from a good family, but overindulges in this beverage, which naturally ferments in the trunks of certain palm trees. I was really interested to see this vessel for consuming the wine.

Senufo Headdress, Ivory Coast

This has thematic similarity to the mask we bought recently in Washington D.C. The hornbill, which is the only motif on our mask, is one of several animals on this mask, along with a hyena, wild boar, chameleon, and ram. The function of this mask is spiritual protection and it is said to be able to emit fire (I don't know if that's literal or symbolic). In the background is a mask that once belonged to the early 20th century artist Andre Derain.

Hornbill Mask, Dan People, Liberia

Gu Mask, Guro People, Ivory Coast

Most of the masks and other objects in this museum are antiques up to 100 years old, which is unusual and demonstrates how excellent this small collection is.