ART on view Senufo: Art and Identity in West Africa 70 Organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art, where it opened on February 22, 2015, Senufo: Art and Identity in West Africa features more than 150 works attributed to artists in Africa but currently housed in museums and private collections in Europe and America as well as Asia. It also includes a handful of historical photographs and books and a selection of prints of Burkina Faso and Mali by contemporary French photographer Agnès Pataux. The exhibition will later travel to the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, France, both fellow members of the French Regional American Museum Exchange (FRAME). The exhibition benefits from the large number and great popularity of objects that European and American collectors, dealers, and scholars labeled as Senufo in the twentieth century. It combines a rich legacy of continuous scholarship on the topic with recent research conducted in Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, and Mali by African, European, and American scholars, including Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi. Especially compelling is the fact that Robert Goldwater’s 1963 landmark exhibition Senufo Sculpture from West Africa for the now-defunct Museum of Primitive Art (MPA) in New York was the last single exhibition in the United States focused exclusively on arts identified as Senufo. In the footsteps of its historic predecessor, Senufo: Art and Identity in West Africa demonstrates the immense diversity of arts typically identified as Senufo. It also includes a number of works collectors, dealers, curators, and other scholars often associate with other cultural labels. As such, some works in the exhibition do not clearly conform to visions of the classic Senufo style. However, the works have historically been linked in some way to individuals or communities identified as Senufo. Goldwater even included some of these objects in the MPA’s 1963 exhibition. When visitors enter Senufo: Art and Identity in West Africa, they revisit the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to examine the earliest European and American engagements with peoples and objects then or now recognized as Senufo. The second section of the exhibition offers a selection of some of the most spectacular objects shown in Goldwater’s 1963 show, and the design emulates the austere, object-focused installation of more than five decades ago. The third section explores arts associated with male-dominated Poro organizations. The following section focuses on objects linked to divination and healing practices, including an array of small-scale copper-alloy sculptures. The fifth section presents a selection of so-called decorative arts, By Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi and Constantine Petridis FIG. 1 (above): “Gwomba, danse des cultes agraires, Zéguédougou Zéguédou.” Mali, 1952–54. Photo by Renée Colin-Noguès. Courtesy Roland Colin, Paris. In the 1950s, Renée Colin-Noguès lived in Sikasso, Mali, with her husband and former colonial administrator, Roland Colin. A series of her photographs in the 2006 book Sénoufo du Mali illustrates performers wearing antelope crest masks similar to the masks connoisseurs and scholars often refer to as ciwaraw or sogonikunw and identify with the Bamana style.
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