150 each tells you something about the other.” From the beginning he’s been interested in the art quality of the objects, but he’s just as interested in the process of the artists as well as what the pieces were intended to be used for. The serial approach helps reveal this and, whenever possible, he’s tried to get more than one example of a given object type. The Lega collection was thoroughly informed by this process. Hardly two Lega objects are the same, but they all relate to one another. What started with a couple of inconsequential pieces from Furman turned into a collection of more than 400 pieces that include a remarkable number of instantly recognizable icons of Lega sculpture. Interestingly, while Jay’s home is filled with stunning examples of African art, most of the Lega collection was never displayed there. Instead it was stored in a bank vault. As the collection grew, he realized he had a substantial percentage of that culture’s material patrimony under his guardianship. If a fire or earthquake had struck his home, that patrimony would have been severely damaged, so he stashed it in a safe place. “You can fit a lot of Lega into a bank box,” he recalls. The first time the collection was really seen as a whole, even by him, was when it was being staged for the exhibition Art of the Lega: Meaning and Metaphor in Central Africa, which was shown at the Fowler Museum in 2001 and traveled to several other US museums as well as the AXA Gallery in New York City. A comprehensive catalog by Elisabeth L. Cameron memorializes the exhibition and remains a central reference on the subject. A revised version of the exhibition will be on view this autumn at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris and a new edition of the catalog in French is being produced to accompany it. The elegant simplicity of Lega art more or less encapsulates Jay’s sense of aesthetics. In the course of his col- FIG. 7: Double cup with legs. Yaka/Suku, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Wood. L: 8 cm. Photo: Scott McCue. FIG. 5: Helmet mask, bwoom. Kuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Wood, pigment. H: 44 cm. Photo: Scott McCue. FIG. 6: Cup in the form of a head. Kuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Wood. H: 23 cm. Photo: Scott McCue.
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