African Arts at the Princeton University Art Museum
2019; UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center; Volume: 52; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1162/afar_a_00448
ISSN1937-2108
Autores Tópico(s)Cultural Industries and Urban Development
ResumoEstablished in 1882 as an encyclopedic teaching museum, the Princeton University Art Museum in Princeton, New Jersey, is home to a group of nearly 750 works of African art, covering almost 2500 years of artistic production on the continent and in its diasporas (Fig. 1). Founded as the Museum of Historic Art at what was then called the College of New Jersey, it was created in tandem with the Department of Art and Archaeology, whose interests profoundly shaped its collecting and exhibition practices.1 The Museum's global holdings of over 100,000 objects span human creativity across time and space, with specializations in ancient Greece and Rome, Asia, western Europe, the United States, Latin America, and Africa.The Museum's African collection, started in 1937, focuses on historic African arts from the sub-Sahara, with particular strengths in central and western African sculpture and masks. These have been complemented in recent decades by contemporary works by artists from the continent and its diasporas. Closely linked to the university's teaching program, the presentation of African works at Princeton—as both objects of ethnographic and aesthetic interest—has mirrored changing attitudes toward non-Western art both in the field and on campus.The collecting, research, and presentation of African arts at Princeton have always reflected the academic interests of its faculty and have varied across eras as well as by department or campus institution. In the mid-1800s, organizing the world—whether by sorting rocks, assembling fossils, or classifying people—had captured the campus's attention. Given this focus, African arts were first collected and displayed at Princeton through the lens of ethnology and natural history.Following a slightly earlier trajectory than the Art Museum, and a separate collecting and exhibiting ethos as well, the E.M. Museum of Geology and Archaeology (also known as the “Guyot Museum” and the “Museum and Art Gallery”) housed non-Western objects in the present-day Faculty Room of Nassau Hall from 1874 to 1909, and later in Guyot Hall as the Museum of Natural History from 1909 to 2000.2 Curated by Swiss-American geographer Arnold Guyot, Princeton's first professor of geology and geography, the Nassau Hall installation's seemingly disparate “antiquities” (anthropological, ethnological, and archaeological objects) gained logic through their spatial organization, which reflected Guyot's linear view of societal progress (Turner 2004: 256). Starting with the dinosaurs at the rear of the room, progressing to so-called primitive cultures at the center (including both Native North Americans such as Inuits and “Pueblos,” as well as Neolithic Swiss lake-dwellers), the wunderkammer-like display approached its zenith with the plaster-cast Greek sculptures. The curatorial climax came with an oil portrait of George Washington, a reflection of Guyot's endorsement of the theory of American Manifest Destiny (Blackman 2017b). Present in both the museum and in his widely disseminated textbooks, Guyot's taxonomy was undeniably racist: It privileged a “normal” white Greco-Roman ideal (illustrated by a tousle-headed Apollo Belvedere) over other supposedly derivative races, including Africans.3 The separation of the races and their arts was underscored in 1889, when paintings and “fine arts”—such as the aforementioned Greek marbles—were moved from the E.M. Museum to the new Museum of Historic Arts (Turner 2004: 261).The historical record is vague as to where African works fit into the physical layout of the Faculty Room exhibition, or if they were ever on view in this early space. Nonetheless, the hierarchical values of its collections and exhibitions—namely the separation of non-Western from Western arts because of their perceived evolutionary inferiority—are important for understanding later presentations of African objects in Princeton's Museum of Natural History. By 1905, the museum in Nassau Hall was organized into geology, paleontology, and archaeology sections, an apparent change from the now-deceased Guyot's original scheme, along with several “ethnological” subsections. Four years later, the present-day Geosciences Building (Guyot Hall) was built to accept the growing dinosaur fossil collection; like the last installation of Nassau Hall, it was arranged by scientific disciplines, foregoing Guyot's original “history of creation” scheme.The contents of the former Museum of Natural History's African collection can be partially reconstituted from historic checklists, labels, and remaining objects. Among its earliest benefactors was Reverend Robert Hamill Nassau, a Princeton Theological Seminary alumnus. As described in 1911, Nassau's collection—called the “West Africa Exhibit”—was located in Guyot Hall's Gallery of Archaeology and Ethnology. A “war canoe prow” (discussed later in this article) was suspended from the gallery's central pillars (The Princeton Alumni Weekly 1911: 317). After being stationed for four decades in what was then German West Africa, Nassau had donated his collection to Princeton in 1902 and 1903.4 The group of objects ranged widely, encompassing jewelry, musical instruments, games, weapons, currency blades, raffia-fiber dresses from the Fang, and a red-feathered prestige headdress from the Cameroon Grassfields. A scholar of religion, Hamill was particularly interested in collecting, documenting, and writing about what he called “fetishes.” Typical among those “fetishes” Nassau gave to the Museum of Natural History is a linked pair of crochet-capped duiker antelope horns filled with empowered materials, described by an accompanying label as “Fetich—If put over a door, will reveal coming evil.”Despite its new organizational system, non-Western art—particularly from Africa—remained an afterthought in the Museum of Natural History at Guyot Hall when compared to its “scientific” holdings of fossils and minerals, areas of intense rivalry and competitive acquisitions among museums that sought to distinguish themselves through large and varied collections. The collection of African material was again augmented on a large scale in 1925, when Dutch geologist Willem A.J.M. van Waterschoot van der Gracht gave a collection of works from eastern and southern Africa (present-day Tanzania, Somalia, Mozambique, Senegal, and Gambia). Gathered in the early twentieth century during one of his many trips as a consulting mining engineer, it ranged from weapons to headrests to beaded jewelry to Zulu hide shields and knobkerries. African material was on view in this new Museum of Natural History on Guyot Hall's first floor until the late 1950s or early 1960s, after which time it remained in storage.When and if works from Africa ever returned to exhibition in Guyot Hall is unclear. Certainly by the mid-1970s, the Museum of Natural History's curators were eager to deaccession or sell African works donated by Nassau and van der Gracht—a mixture of “objets d'art” and “ethnological” objects, as curator Donald Baird described—or to transfer them to the art museum at Princeton or elsewhere (Baird 1974: 2). The entire Museum of Natural History was deinstalled in 2000, its spaces slowly overtaken by offices, classrooms, and new research units. Its collections were dispersed to other institutions, to storage, or elsewhere on campus (The Smilodon 2009: 1–2; Dalton 2000). The slow decline of the Museum of Natural History, and of its ethnology displays in particular, represented a gradual shift in academic interests on campus. No longer would the products of African cultures be viewed as simple artifacts of material culture, but—over the process of several decades—as art, deserving of a place in the Art Museum.Just a short walk across campus from Nassau and Guyot Halls, Princeton's historic homes of natural history, works by African makers were viewed through a dramatically different lens at the Art Museum. Although being in the museum lent African objects a kind of de facto “artistic merit” that they lacked in the natural history collections, that didn't mean that their importance or their makers were immediately recognized or emphasized. It took many decades of slow growth and increasing visibility for the African works to both be fully appreciated as “art” and take the pride of place that they hold in the Art Museum today.From its nineteenth-century genesis, the purpose of the Museum of Historic Art (now the Princeton University Art Museum) was to collect and exhibit works of art to support the teaching goals of the university both in and beyond the Department of Art and Archaeology.5 Although both were founded in 1882, the Art Museum and the Department were born into a relationship which—while symbiotic—was not totally equal when it came to influence over Museum-related activities. Given the emphasis on direct teaching through objects, the interests of Art and Archaeology faculty drove acquisitions and exhibitions well into the late twentieth century, resulting in a collection whose strengths reflected curricular focus areas, such as photography or the arts of China (Bunnell 1976: 2). Lacking specialist curatorial or faculty stewardship until the 2000s, the African arts collection at Princeton grew without a definitive path for much of its history, like that of many American museums that belatedly prioritized Africa. While works from Pharaonic Egypt have been part of the Art Museum since its 1890 opening, the collection of African arts as we now know it began in 1937 with a single work, a carved wooden amulet said to be from Ethiopia.6 As was the case in other Museum departments, its holdings were shaped by the intertwined influences of scholarship, the art market, and the tastes of alumni donors, whose gifts make up the majority of the collection. Like most Western museums, the collection leans heavily towards works from western and central Africa, essentially excluding north Africa and Egypt because of an artificial division between the supposed Arab north and the black sub-Sahara. Shaped largely by the geographies of colonialism and the tastes of European modernists like Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani, so-called discoverers of African art at the turn of the twentieth century who lauded its pure formal abstraction, these collections focused on a distinct canon of nineteenth and twentieth century sculptures and masks in wood. Highly influential, it set a circumscribed precedent for what was classified as museum-quality African art, despite the fact that African creative forms are far more diverse in terms of time, region, and material.It was under the directorship of Frank Jewett Mather Jr. (1922–1946), a scholar of the European Renaissance, that sub-Saharan art entered the collection for the first time. Beyond the aforementioned Ethiopian pendant, Mather—a collector of European medieval and Renaissance art—gifted two outstanding Ethiopian Christian works from his personal collection to the museum after his retirement. Recently identified by this author as a rare late fifteenth or early sixteenth century icon, a small tempera on wood diptych depicting the Virgin Mary with Christ Child and an equestrian St. George demonstrates the bold geometry favored by northern priest-artists in Tₔgray (Fig. 2). One of only two known works by this painterly hand, it is a remarkable survival of pre-jihad (1529–1543) Ethiopian Orthodox art from the early modern era. Equally impressive is the eighteenth-century manuscript, which includes Gₔ'ₔz canticles, psalms, and praises to Mary among its sumptuously illuminated parchment folios. Potentially linked to the Empress Taitu Beitul (r. 1889–1918) by a drawing accompanying the volume, the manuscript's naturalistic shading and lushly painted textiles epitomize the style used at the courtly workshops in the capital of Gondär. There, courtly priest-artists transposed the stories of the Bible into eighteenth-century Ethiopia, setting many scenes in front of Gondär's iconic domed stone castles. In one evocative scene, Moses divides the Red Sea with the T-headed mäqwqwamiya staff of the Ethiopian Orthodox clergy, as Pharaoh (wearing a tiered Ethiopian crown) and his musket-bearing soldiers slide beneath the waves on the opposite page (Fig. 3).7 While decidedly a part of the continent, Ethiopia was kept academically apart from it until relatively recent years because of its majority Christian faith and painting-based artistic practices. Thus, the Museum did not acknowledge these works as “African” at the time of their acquisition.With just three pieces from Ethiopia, the Art Museum's African holdings remained small until the mid-twentieth century, when the collection was transformed by a major gift. In 1947, a tenacious woman named Joyce K. Doyle made a gift of five trunks containing some 150 works from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, then known as the Belgian Congo (Doyle 1947: 1). Joyce's husband, Donald B. Doyle (Class of 1905), had worked as a mine manager for Forminière, a Belgian lumber and diamond mining company based in the Kasaï region of that infamous colony between 1919 and 1923. From their homestead in Tshikapa, Doyle collected what she described as “bintus,” relying upon prospectors “to bring [me] the things that Africans made and had used” (Doyle 1976: 1). George Young, a Forminière diamond prospector, was her primary resource. Despite his professing to have “hated everything African,” it was through his hand that Doyle acquired Pende masks, dozens of Kuba cut-pile embroidered prestige cloths, and utilitarian objects ranging from arrows to sleeping mats. Photographs suggest that Doyle, who was fluent in Ciluba, also traveled herself to obtain some works (Brett-Smith 1983: 10). Among the pieces she collected from Kuba, Pende, and Chokwe artists—some of which may have been commissions or early tourist pieces—we count two frequently exhibited works, a Chokwe headrest and a Kuba cometic box.8 The visual balance of twinned caryatids on the headrest evokes the balance of order and leadership associated with Chokwe sovereigns (Fig. 4). With deep-set eyes and long beards, the figures recall both the elders and the deceased ancestors. Their pose—elbows on knees and hands cradling cheeks—further suggests a representation of the departed or of those dreaming to seek wisdom. Carved from a lustrous deep brown wood, the figures are further decorated with imported metal furniture tacks, alluding to the wealth Chokwe leaders amassed through both local and long-distance trade. A wooden cosmetic box carved by a Kuba artist to hold bright red tukula powder draws its form and elaborate interlaced patterns from a heritage of courtly prestige objects dating back to at least the sixteenth century (Fig. 5). Square on top and bottom and round in the center, its shape echoes that of baskets owned by those of humbler status.Although collected around Tshikapa, the works of the Doyle collection provide insight into regional diversity and the ways in which trade allowed different artistic styles to come into mutually influential contact with one another, while still staying distinct. Many of the Kuba embroidered cloths, for example, came from far north of Tshikapa or were produced in styles meant to appeal to trading clients.9 Equally, Doyle's letters underscore how her appreciation for central African cultures—and her desire for them to be showcased in an art museum—was unusual, given the harsh and condescending opinions of other foreigners (such as Young) living in Congo in the 1920s. Accessioned in 1953, the Doyle gift remains one of the Museum's largest collections of African arts, and its sole fully field-collected grouping. Director and former Monuments Man Ernest DeWald (1946–1960) welcomed these “Central African curios”—as Doyle also described them—to the Museum, noting the lack of comparable works in the collection (DeWald 1947: 1; Doyle 1947: 1.)10Despite this warm welcome, the archive suggests that works from the Doyle collection were not permanently exhibited in the 1950s or 1960s (Doyle 1976: 2). How often and where in the museum they were displayed during temporary exhibitions is unclear (DeWald 1953: 1). When African works appeared in the Museum's exhibition ledgers during this decade, it was invariably the Ethiopian manuscript, a perennial favorite in a series of annual Easter and Christmastime exhibitions.11 Nonetheless, at least a partial vision had been achieved for guiding the display of the African collection, as well as for reshaping its holdings, after Patrick Joseph Kelleher (1960–1973) took up the directorial helm in 1960. Describing the endowment for a Gallery of Native Arts (which would include works from Africa) in a future new building, Kelleher wrote, “It is our hope to exhibit in this gallery a broad selection of objects of various primitive cultures around the globe but slanted toward artistic quality rather than ethnological importance” (Kelleher 1962: 1). Following this mandate, a series of gifts during the 1960s from alumnus J. Lionberger Davis (Class of 1900) added new temporal and aesthetic depth to the collection with several brass works from the Kingdom of Benin, including a horn-blower from a palace plaque, an idiophone topped by the bird of prophecy, and a mustachioed Portuguese man, likely from an altar tableau. Standout among the works in this gift was a delicately cast latticework cylindrical bracelet with four Portuguese figures (Fig. 6). The mounted and standing figures alternate directions around the cuff, permitting both viewer and wearer to simultaneously appreciate the fine texture of their hair and the varied patterns of their seventeenth-century garments.Despite the rapid growth of the collection, there was no specialist curator of African arts in the mid-twentieth century at Princeton, as remains the case today. Following the practices of the times in all of the Museum's collecting areas, there was also no dedicated gallery for African arts. Alongside works from Asia, Europe, and the Americas, African objects were included in exhibitions that moved around gallery spaces, their groupings frequently justified by the newness of their acquisition. While the Museum's records are vague on the details, Gillett Griffin, curator of Pre-Columbian and Native American art, was a least nominally responsible for approving the acquisition of some African objects and the coordination of exhibitions from the 1960s until his 2005 retirement, although less so from the 1990s onward. Other curators assisted in special projects.During the 1960s and 1970s, the study of African arts and history took on new significance across the United States as the last of the African nations subjugated by colonialism gained their independence and African Americans across the country continued to fight for their civil rights and recognition. In the academic world—though not yet at Princeton—the study of African art history flourished as the first PhDs of the late 1950s began to train the next generation of scholars. On Princeton's campus, student demands prompted the 1968 foundation of Afro-American Studies (now the Department of African American Studies), incorporating faculty and visiting lecturers in history, politics, psychology, English, and African American studies.12 Three years later, Black Panther Party cofounder Huey Newton spoke to a crowd of nearly six thousand at Jadwin Gym, explaining the party's ideology of “revolutionary intercommunalism” (Elkind 1971: 1). Despite the first admission of black students during World War II, Princeton remained largely segregated decades later. To provide a social, cultural, and political environment that reflected the needs and concerns of students of color, the university established the Third World Center (now the Carl A. Fields Center for Equality and Cultural Understanding) in 1971 (Mendez 2015). With a new focus on black culture and a strong student activist culture, the stage was set for a greater appreciation of African arts at Princeton.Indeed, 1971 proved to be a significant year for African arts at Princeton. That year, the Museum hosted African Sculpture, an exhibition that faculty-curator of Asian Art Wen Fong described as the Museum's “best attended exhibition ever” (Fong 1971: 1).13 Organized for Princeton by the Museum of African Art in Washington, DC (now the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution), the exhibition African Sculpture was arranged at Princeton by Gillett Griffin (then curator of Indigenous Arts) and Lydia Puccinelli of the Washington museum (Ford and Hommel 1971: 10). Combining 160 works from the DC collection, as well as highlights from private collections, the exhibition emphasized both aesthetics and cultural context (Fig. 7). Divided into sections on the Niger and Congo River basins, as well as the western coast, it was accompanied by “the rhythms of African tribal music … recorded in Africa,” as well as a catalogue with text by William L. Hommel (Ford and Hommel 1971: 10). Programming included a lecture by George Nelson Preston, then of Livingston College, and a screening of Julien and Sam Bryan's 1969 film The Ancient Africans, lending further temporal depth to the presentation. As described by the Princeton Alumni Weekly, photographs of “African life” augmented the objects, primarily historic sculptures, textiles, and musical instruments. Despite organizers’ efforts to demonstrate the range of African arts from ancient times to the present-day, the impression of “African” cultural homogeneity—African culture, African belief, African sculpture—and an ethnographic tone prevailed in the local and campus press. “Though displayed as works of art, the objects are placed in relatively the same positions as they might have appeared in ritual or daiy [sic] use and their functions explained to enrich their meaning” (Town Topics 1971). African Sculpture was a landmark at Princeton for both its ambitious scale and its enthusiastic reception, attracting over 12,000 attendees. The show proved so successful, it was extended by several weeks: It would be Princeton's largest exhibition of African arts until the 2000s.Despite occupying only an “unprepossessing corner in the galleries, between pre-Columbian and Chinese art,” the permanent collection continued to grow through gifts during the 1960s and 1970s (Rosenbaum 1979a: 1). It received a particular boost when Perry E.H. Smith (Class of 1957) deposited a significant collection of long-term loans and promised gifts, most of which have now entered the collection. A Kinshasa-based missionary for the International Church World Service from 1971 to 1974/5, Smith traveled throughout the Democratic Republic of the Congo, acquiring works primarily from other missionaries, but also from runners and the Kinshasa markets. Among other works, the 1981 exhibition African Tribal Art from the Museum's Collection showcased highlights from the Smith collection, including a sensitively rendered kaolin-encrusted Lega maskette, a large grouping of Yaka n-kisyan khanda masks, and a ceremonial Chokwe seat with scenes of masquerades and noble life (Fig. 8).While Doyle's collection of work from the Democratic Republic of Congo had been referred to as “curios” when it arrived at the museum in the late 1940s, Smith's gift was referred to by then acting director Allen Rosenbaum as “African tribal arts,” reflecting a gradual shift in perspective about African cultural production at the Museum that had started in the 1950s (Rosenbaum 1979b: 1).14 While the increased use of the term “art” was positive, the addition of the word “tribal” was less so. “Tribe”—an inaccurate concept that not only mischaracterizes historical African social organizations, but also has racist and colonial implications—as used at Princeton's Art Museum during the 1970s and 1980s reflected both the lack of expertise in African arts at the institution and the wider usage of the term during this period (see Keim 2008). This shift towards “tribal” was reflected not only in the 1981 exhibition title and in internal museum discussions, but also in local publications, which spoke in generalities about the “geometric complexities, inherent in African art” and emphasized the role of “craftsmen” in the creation of “functional art” which influenced European modernists like Klee, Braque, and Picasso (Schwartz 1981: 8b). Certainly, the use of “tribal” at Princeton was not unique to that institution during this period, but rather reflected a greater moment in the museum field in which both “primitive art” and “tribal art” were still commonly used to describe African arts, even as a growing discomfort with the inappropriateness and inaccuracy of the term was becoming clear in both popular and scholarly forums.15While African objects gained prominence at the Art Museum during the 1970s, where they were exhibited and described as “art,” it must be remembered that at the same time, African works were also part of the ethnological collections at the Museum of Natural History just across campus. Social science courses—rather than art history—benefited from these collections. While not a focal point of the Department of Art and Archaeology's curriculum, the Art Museum's African collection—particularly works from Congo—enriched teaching in the anthropology department. Professor Hildred Geertz, best known for her work in Bali and Morocco, incorporated Kuba textiles, Pende masks, and other work into her course “Art, Society, and Culture,” emphasizing the difference between so-called aesthetic and utilitarian objects (Bunnell 1976: 2). With these dual realms of exhibition and study, African objects at Princeton were simultaneously art and artifact during the 1970s.Prior to 1989, portions of the African collections were displayed in the “courtyard” gallery (the present-day Marquand-Mather gallery) or alongside works from other collection areas in New Acquisitions exhibitions.16 The courtyard space also hosted events featuring African works, such as Black History Month collaborations with the then-Third World Center, although a permanent home for the collection was still wanting (Rosenbaum 1989: 2).17 By the 1980s, during the tenure of director Allen Rosenbaum (1980–1998), it had become near mantra among generations of directors to thank donors with a note that they hoped to exhibit their gifts in a new, dedicated space for the African collection.18As the decade closed, at long last the hoped-for gallery of African art became a reality, as the museum renovated its lower-level galleries and added the Mitchell/Giurgola-designed Mitchell Wolfson Jr., Class of 1963 Wing. For the first time in its history, the African arts collection received a small, permanent home in the museum. Opened to the public on March 24, 1990, the lower level African gallery included large recessed wall cases along with space for free-standing cases (Princeton Weekly Bulletin 1990: 4). Now the focus of systematic attention from the Museum, the collection also benefited from the interventions of several specialists over the next three decades. It gained a strong advocate and a renewed aesthetic focus with the 1992 arrival of independent scholar Holly W. Ross, who has since served as both a guest and consulting curator for the collection and several exhibitions. As part of a 1991 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, art historian Dominique Malaquais came to Princeton as a lecturer in African arts during the 1997–1998 academic year, focusing two courses and a series of publications in the museum's Record on the collection.19As in earlier decades, the 1990s saw the African collection transformed yet again by alumni generosity. The 1998 bequest of long-time museum supporter John B. Elliott, Class of 1951, totaled some 250 works primarily from central and western Africa, to date the largest gift in this collecting area. Elliott's gift included the Museum's first works from southern Africa, a series of objects meant for daily use including a suite of diversely formed wooden headrests made by Tsonga and Nguni carvers. A marvel of technical skill, a double-headrest with dangling teardrop-shaped snuff containers (isigqiki) joined by a smooth wooden chain is among the highlights (Fig. 9). This, and over 40 other objects from what was then the Elliott loan at Princeton, had comprised half the checklist of Objects of Use, a 1987–1988 National Museum of African Art exhibition. Rounding out the gift was an impressive array of Akan goldweights and royal regalia, including a nineteenth-century rawhide gun bearer's cap adorned with carved swords and rifles (Fig. 10), complementing earlier Akan acquisitions of the late twentieth century, including a glimmering akrafokᵓcnmu pectoral badge (Fig. 11). A permanent case of Akan regalia was created with these and other works, now a perennial favorite among educators, students, and docents, as well as generations of elementary school visitors.The 2000s marked the beginning of two decades of renewed commitment to African arts in both the museum and in the Department of Art and Archaeology, whose teaching projects retained influence on the museum's collecting and exhibiting practices. For the first time in its history, African and diaspora arts were taught in the Department on a permanent basis following the 2008 appointment of Professor Chika Okeke-Agulu. His ongoing engagement with the museum started soon after with his cocuration (with Holly W. Ross) of Life Objects: Rites of Passage in African Art, a 2009–2010 loan show of works from the Art Museum, the National Museum of African Art, and private collections. Meant to give the students in his freshman seminar “Art and Lifecycle in Africa” direct access to art objects, it was the first special exhibition of African arts at Princeton in nearly three decades.20 The exhibition considered how a
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