Page 136

•TribalPaginaIntera.indd

KONGO Power and Majesty PILAT 2015 English category Alisa LaGamma, ed. Published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art 23 x 28 cm, 308 pages, 261 color illustrations 134 2015 BOOKS PILAT Tribal Art magazine: The groundbreaking exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which this book documents, ended on January 3 of this year, but this catalog will last far longer. This speaks to substantial differences in the work process. Can you tell us something about how this book was created? Alisa LaGamma: It was inspiring and profoundly moving to experience the original works of art we were able to assemble for Kongo: Power and Majesty as a corpus, thanks to the more than fi fty institutional and private lenders to the project. When I began working on this project four years ago, we essentially developed a network of international partnerships with the various institutional repositories of these works. This involved studying the works carefully with the Metropolitan’s conservators and scientists in dialog with colleagues in those museums, reviewing whatever was known about their collection histories, and photographing them. Many of them were relatively unfamiliar even to specialists in the fi eld of African art, so we wanted to introduce them as fully as possible both pictorially and in terms of the extent of what is known about their histories and manufacture. For this reason, some of the chapters include the research of museum conservators and scientists as contributors. I fi nd it greatly satisfying that all the effort to which so many colleagues went in order to contribute their expertise on various aspects of the content is refl ected in such a substantive and beautifully designed publication. We packed an enormous amount of information within the exhibition presentation, but we gathered so much more than could ever be incorporated into that format. We conceived of the book as a long-term resource that provides a great deal of material not previously published. T. A. M.: Kongo Power and Majesty is a chronicle of fi ve centuries of contact between two worlds, Africa and the West, but it is also the result of strong collaboration between eminent scholars. What are the main achievements of this joint analysis of Kongo history through its art? A. L.: When I fi rst immersed myself in this subject, I was dazzled by the richness of the literature that historians have produced. It was fi lled with astonishingly unfamiliar detail and afforded remarkable time depth. In this regard, there was a substantial disconnect with the comparatively generalized manner in which the artistic record produced by Kongo artists was discussed. At the same time, the pioneering work by Robert Farris Thompson, Wyatt MacGaffey, and Ezio Bassani provided a powerful foundation upon which to build. The style of this book is not to have object catalog entries separate from the essays, but to situate the works within the broader historical commentary. We met with an advisory group of international colleagues in the fi elds of history, archaeology, anthropology, and art history several years ago at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, to discuss the best approach to take for the exhibition and Three Questions for Alisa LaGamma ABOVE: Cover and page 17 of Kongo: Power and Majesty, winner of the 2015 Prix International du Livre d’Art Tribal. ABOVE RIGHT: Mother and child attributed to the Master of Kasadi. Kongo, Yombe subgroup, DR Congo, Republic of Congo, or Cabinda (Angola), reproduced as fi g. 125, pages 186 and 187 in Kongo: Power and Majesty.


•TribalPaginaIntera.indd
To see the actual publication please follow the link above