ART ON VIEW
90
FIG. 8 (above): Qaf, “Al Alsmaie Tales” (1983, made in
London). By Ali Omar Ermes (b. 1945, Tripoli, Libya).
Works in London, United Kingdom.
Acrylic and ink on paper. 104.5 x 133.4 cm.
National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, purchased with funds
provided by the Smithsonian Collections Acquisition Program, inv. 96-22-2.
Photo: Franko Khoury.
FIG. 6 (left): Earth-Moon
Connexions (1995, made
in Nsukka). By El Anatsui
(b. 1944, Anyako, Volta
Region, Ghana).
Works in Nsukka, Enugu
State, Nigeria.
Wood, paint. 90 x 84.4 x 3 cm.
National Museum of African Art,
Smithsonian Institution, purchased
with funds provided by the
Smithsonian Collections Acquisition
Program, inv. 96-17-1.
Photo: Franko Khoury.
FIG. 7 (below): Crucifi x,
nkangi kiditu. Kongo artist.
Kongo Central Province,
Democratic Republic of the
Congo. 17th century.
Copper alloy. H: 21.6 cm.
National Museum of African Art,
Smithsonian Institution, gift of Walt
Disney World Co., a subsidiary of
The Walt Disney Company,
inv. 2005-6-106.
Photo: Franko Khoury.
own, or simply to look fabulous. Seen in the context
of a museum display, these objects are free
to simultaneously present multiple messages, including
power, faith, gender, and personal style.
Communication with the realm beyond takes
on a range of forms. In creating an nkondi kiditu,
(fi g. 7), the Kongo artist fully embodied the fi gurative
concept of communion with the divine. Ali
Omar Ermes (fi g. 8), on the other hand, uses the
expressive potential of the Arabic letter ق (qaf)—
the fi rst consonant of the fi rst word received in
the transmission of the Qur’an to Mohammed—
to express the potential of language and poetry
to convey “light to the human mind, just as fi re,
in total darkness, is light for the human eye.” A
Fang artist created the magnifi cent eyema bieri
(fi g. 10) once owned by Marius de Zayas to embody
and help facilitate concepts of reincarnation
and communion with
revered ancestors.
A unique and evocative
fi gure of a man riding a
buffalo (fi g. 9) by a Pende
artist, in turn, brings the concept of protection
from terror onto another level. In eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century central Africa, traders in
human captives rode oxen from Portuguese slave
trade centers on the coast into Angola and the
Congo River basin. Perhaps this fi gure represents
such a trader or possibly the power of a Pende
leader to protect his people from the slave trade.
and apprenticeship practiced
in Africa’s academic art
programs in the twentieth
century—particularly at the
universities of Khartoum (Sudan) and Nskukka
(Nigeria). One of many works in the museum’s
collection by El Anatsui, Earth-Moon Connexions
(fi g. 6) is presented as emblematic of both
the fl owering of Anatsui’s own personal style
while teaching at Nsukka and of his role as mentor
to succeeding generations of artists emerging
from the Nsukka school. Uniquely, the installation
will include work from three generations of
Nsukka school artists.
VISION IN ACTION
From Western collections viewed through the eyes
of scholars, who in some cases have recovered
the hands of individual artists, to a celebration of
artistic agency and insight, the next gallery will
focus on the original local contexts in which African
artworks were created. This gallery examines
the role of sponsors, as well as the particular
problems that artworks were originally designed
to solve in communicating with intended viewers,
whether of this world or the next.
This gallery will concentrate on three primary
contexts toward which such objects were initially
addressed: political, religious, and personal. Men
and women commissioned these works from artists
in order to support political authority, to
establish connections with a realm beyond our