AN IMPORTANT NEW SCULPTURE AT LACMA Los Angeles—Last April, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art acquired an ancient and important Bamana maternity shrine figure in a style known as gwandusu. The three-foot-high figure of a seated mother holding a child across her lap has been carbon dated to between 1432 and 1644, making it earlier than comparable figures in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other museums with important African art collections. Indeed, according to Polly Nooter Roberts, curator of African art at LACMA and a noted Africanist at UCLA, “It’s one of the oldest surviving wood sculptures of Africa and probably the oldest Gwan figure in existence.” Though missing certain elements, notably the baby’s head and the mother’s feet and characteristic braids, it is also an aesthetically remarkable example of a form that is all too often blocky and awkward. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, the LACMA’s Collectors Committee allocated $1 million out of a total acquisitions budget of $3 million to acquire the sculpture, almost twice what any other acquisition from this year’s fund was purchased for. This reinforces the museum’s commitment to the development of an important African art collection, a dedicated gallery for which was also inaugurated there this year. The exterior of the Museum for African Art, now Africa Central. Photo courtesy of Africa Central, New York. Mother and child figure for the Gwan association. Bamana, Mali. AD 1432–1644. Wood. H: 99 cm. Gift of the 2013 Collectors Committee with additional funds provided by Kelvin Davis and Bobby Kotick. Photo © 2013 Museum Associates/LACMA. A CHANGE OF FOCUS New York City—The muchbeleaguered process of creating a new home for the Museum for African Art has taken a new turn. The organization announced in August that it is changing its mandate from being simply a museum focused on the art of Africa to becoming an African policy center along the lines of the Asia Society. Plans for the new center still include a museum, but it will be augmented with a policy institute and a members’ club for those interested in Africa, and the overall focus will be the encouragement of development on the African continent. The organization’s board hopes that this broader base will aid in their $60 million capital campaign, which is needed to complete the new space at 110th Street and Fifth Avenue on the north end of New York’s Museum Mile. A launch party rechristening the unfinished space as the new institution to be called Africa Central was held on September 26. The event was attended by the likes of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Harry Belafonte, Bono, and billionaire philanthropist Mo Ibrahim. The opening date depends on fundraising efforts, but the target is set for 2014 to have at least a pop-up in the space. NEW CURATOR FOR AFRICAN ART IN ST. LOUIS St. Louis—Nichole N. Bridges has joined the Saint Louis Art Museum as associate curator for African art and the associate curator in charge of overseeing the Museum’s Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Bridges most recently was associate curator at the Newark Museum. Prior to that, she was head of the Department of the Arts of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific Islands at the Baltimore Museum of Art and a museum educator at the Brooklyn Museum. She holds a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where her dissertation focused on nineteenth-century Kongo ivory sculpture from the Loango Coast of west-central Africa. She has held prestigious fellowships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium; and the National Museum of African Art of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington. Nichole N. Bridges. Photo: Wilson Santiago.
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