African art at the BMA
Karen Milbourne, curator of African art at the Baltimore Museum of Art, has put together a stellar show for her valedictory installment of Meditations on African Art, the three-part series of exhibitions begun in 2006 designed to bring the museum's African artworks into dialogue with its collection of early European modernist works.
The first two installments focused on the elements light and color in the traditional arts of Africa and their evolution in the work of contemporary African artists. The current show examines pattern as an element of design in both traditional and contemporary African art.
Alas, this show also marks Milbourne's valedictory effort as curator at the BMA. At the end of the month, she's leaving to take up her new duties as a curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington. During her three years in Baltimore, Milbourne brought a penetrating intellect, enormous scholarly knowledge and an imaginative eye to her stewardship of the African collection. She also found new ways to open up the collection; prior to this exhibition, two-thirds of the works now on view had never been displayed publicly.
The show is divided into four sections:
The first explores pattern as form, and it includes lovely examples of traditional African textiles, ceremonial swords and shields, ivory carving, vessels, jewelry and an intricately carved tent pole. All the objects have great intrinsic beauty, but what makes the pieces even more compelling are the innovative installation and lighting techniques Milbourne has created to highlight their unique visual characteristics.
The ceremonial shields, for example, are displayed high on the walls on mounts that swing out toward the viewer, allowing viewers to appreciate their sculptural qualities as well as the bold patterns inscribed on their surfaces. A collection of wooden dye stamps used to print the repetitive patterns on traditional African textiles is displayed in a display case lit from above so the stamps' shadows create their own distinctive patterns on the white wall behind them. The pairing of a 5-foot-tall carved tent pole with a diminutive copper hairpin of nearly the same design points up the recurrence of similar patterns on vastly different scales.
Other sections of the installation focus on the use and meaning of pattern as bodily adornment, on the rich pattern tradition of the Kuba people in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the pattern-based work of Nigerian-born contemporary artist Mary Evans, whose site-specific installations of cut-paper and vinyl at the BMA are conceptually and formally linked to the work of both Henri Matisse and Kara Walker.
(Photo courtesy of the Baltimore Museum of Art)
