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80 Kuba Textiles: Geometry in Form, Space, and Time By Marie-Thérèse Brincard ART on view From March 1 through June 14, 2015, a major exhibition on Kuba skirts and overskirts is being presented at the Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase College, SUNY, just north of New York City. It is the first exhibition to bring together works from two of the earliest collections of Kuba textiles held by Western institutions: that of the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale (MRAC) in Tervuren, Belgium, founded by King Leopold II in 1897 (fig. 1); and that of the Sheppard Collection at Hampton University in Virginia (fig. 2), assembled between 1890 and 1910 by an American Presbyterian missionary in the Congo, the Reverend William Henry Sheppard. The latter is thought by many to be the first Westerner to have been received by Kot aMweeky, the Kuba nyim (ruler), in 1892. Kuba Textiles: Geometry in Form, Space, and Time showcases nineteen skirts and overskirts from the MRAC and six pivotal examples from the Hampton University museum, which are complemented by eleven other fine garments from the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and three collectors prominent in the field of African textiles: Beverley Birks, Andres Moraga, and David Lantz. The exhibition has several goals, not the least of which is the introduction to a wider audience of the resplendent surface embellishments of these garments, which, like other Kuba decorative arts, are detailed and complex to a degree found in no other African kingdom. Living in the Kasai region of what is now the DRC, the Kuba peoples, composed of seventeen distinctive groups, have produced textiles that are remarkable not only for their beauty but also for their large scale, as some of these textiles reach nearly thirty feet in length. They are worn on special occasions by men and women and display the status of the wearer. Among the Bushoong, the predominant Kuba group, a woman’s skirt of this kind is called ncák, and a man’s, mapel, while an overskirt is called ncák minen’ishushuna. FIG. 1 (left): Two panels for a decorated skirt. Kuba or Ngongo, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Late 19th century. Collected by Captain Adolphe-Henri- Albert de Macar, 1885–88. Raffia, resist-dye. 59 x 154 cm. Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale, Tervuren, EO.0.0.24196. Photo: J.-M. Vandyck; © Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale, Tervuren.


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