CLEVELAND, Ohio — The Cleveland Museum of Art has experimented from time to time with installations or temporary exhibitions that mix historical and contemporary art.
But it has probably never done so well in this vein as it has in “Second Careers: Two Tributaries in African Art,’' a terrific show on view through Sunday, March 14, that displays nine examples of traditional African art alongside contemporary pieces by six artists from Africa or with African roots.
Organized by Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi, who served from 2017 to 2019 as the Cleveland museum’s curator of African art, and its first Black curator, the show fills the ground-level Focus Gallery with works so bold and energetic that they make the space feel tight and constrained.
For example, a large wall piece made with distressed burlap, wire, and threads by Nnenna Okore, a native of Australia who grew up in eastern Nigeria, creates diaphanous clouds of red and black filaments extending from floor to ceiling. The piece is compelling, but it’s so big that it makes it seem as if the ceiling of the Focus Gallery is pressing down on the interior.
It’s an example of how the scale, dynamism, and excellence of the contemporary pieces in the show argue for display in a larger gallery, if not a bigger show altogether. To put a positive spin on the situation, it’s always good when a show leaves you wanting more.
The exhibition’s multilayered concept is a bit complex and it takes a moment or two to digest.
First, the show is based on the idea that traditional African masks and sculptures, originally used in ritual observances, experience “second careers’' in a museum context, where they acquired fresh meanings beyond what they signified in their culture of origin.
This is not always a happy story because it’s rooted in power imbalances of colonialism. African objects in European and American museums were sometimes removed violently by military force or amassed by collectors who showed little interest in their histories.
Faced with this reality, museums like Cleveland’s often treat such artworks as emblematic examples of their type. Western ways of seeing African art can also constitute a form of “appropriation’' that submerges original meanings beneath imperialist notions of primitivism. Think of Pablo Picasso’s appropriation of African art in his co-invention of Cubism in the early decades of the 20th century, and you get the idea.
In the second type of “second career,’' the exhibition looks at works of art by contemporary African artists who have been influenced by classic examples. The contemporary works show that artists make beautiful things out of recycled or “found” materials, emulating the materiality and handwork of traditional African artists and artisans.
One such comparison is that of a 19th-century carved wood “Prestige Chair’' made by the Babanki peoples of Cameroon. It conveys power and authority by showing male and female figures mounted on stylized leopards.
The show displays the chair alongside the 2009 “Harmony Chair’' by Mozambican artist Goncalo Mabunda, made with decommissioned handguns, rifles, land mines, mortar shells, machine-gun belts, and rocket-propelled grenades — all discarded after the end of Mozambique’s 16-year civil war in 1992.
Another key example illustrating ties between past and present in African art is that of “Tightrope: non-essential speed,’' a massive wall piece by Ethiopian artist Elias Sime. He used recycled electrical wires and connectors discarded locally or shipped into the country as e-waste to create a stunning abstract mural that resembles swirling patterns of water, or perhaps ripples in a desert consisting of colored sand.
The exhibition’s catalog likens Sime’s type of recycling with that of a late 19th- or early 20th-century Malinke hunter’s shirt from Mali in West Africa, a powerful object whose dark fabric is festooned with animal teeth, tusks, and claws fastened with leather thongs.
In both instances, “found objects” acquire aesthetic and even spiritual power through a transformational creative process.
The two kinds of “second careers’' under examination in the show illuminate what is known, and not known, about African art, and how contemporary artists and scholars are reconstructing the past while creating meaningful connections to the present.
To that end, the show highlights an early 20th-century “Egúngún Masquerade Dance Costume” from Nigeria in West Africa, on loan from the Brooklyn Museum in New York, using it as a commanding centerpiece. It’s a wide-shouldered, tentlike construction of colorful fabric strips and patterns that appear ready to whirl and swirl in space.
The impression of movement and action is heightened by the off-kilter way in which the piece is mounted on its stand, with one side of its horizontal top ridge higher than the other. It pulls the eye in with color and detail but sends a viewer’s attention spinning away toward surrounding pieces, like a performer in a public square.
Nzewi included the piece not just because of its beauty and imposing presence, but because it embodies the lengths to which contemporary scholars are going in order to reconstruct the original meanings of traditional African works.
Kristen Windmuller-Luna, the curator of African Art at the Brooklyn Museum when Nzewi was in Cleveland, spent the summer of 2018 researching the origins of the Egúngún by traveling to Ògbómoso, a village in Nigeria’s Oyo State.
There, she met with members of the Lekewogbe family, whose forebears originally commissioned the dance costume. She then cataloged each of the 300 strips of fabric in the piece, illuminating its origins in the history of textile manufacturing and trade in Africa.
In the exhibition, Nzewi likens the dance costume to a powerful wall piece by Ghanaian and Nigerian artist El Anatsui, famous around the world for massive creations fashioned out of thousands of crushed metal bottle caps. (The artist was the subject of a memorable 2012 exhibition at the Akron Art Museum, which owns one of his pieces).
Both works are examples of how African artists then and now have created magnificent things out of discarded scraps, underscoring key concepts in the show: transformation, materiality, and cultural memory.
Another layer of continuity in the exhibit is that Windmuller-Luna succeeded Nzewi in 2019 as the Cleveland museum’s African curator. Nzewi left Cleveland in the same year to become a curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In a way, then, the exhibition is a baton handoff between two scholars engaged in promoting a greater understanding of African art, new and old.
Despite the high polish embodied by the show’s installation and catalog, the exhibition feels like a sketch for something much larger. In that sense, it argues convincingly for giving much greater time, space, and attention to art from Africa, not just in Cleveland, but everywhere.
REVIEW
What’s up: “Second Careers: Two Tributaries in African Art.’'
Venue: Cleveland Museum of Art.
Where: 11151 East Blvd., Cleveland.
When: Through Sunday, March 14.
Admission: Free. Face coverings, temperature checks and timed tickets required. Go to Cleveland.org or call 216-421-7350.
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