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historian Jan Vansina fi rst noted in 1978, “any
working hypothesis must remain vague until the
necessary task of cataloging and dating the extant
corpus of art objects is undertaken. This is
the task of a museum. The study of Kuba art
has, in fact, barely begun.”2
Enter the Baltimore Museum of Art’s Kuba:
Fabric of an Empire (August 19, 2018–February
24, 2019).3 This exhibition uses carbon-dating
analysis to establish a defi nitive timeline of Kuba
artistic innovation. At the beginning of the project,
samples from forty-two Kuba textiles were
sent to the Rafter Radiocarbon Laboratory, a
carbon-14 dating department within New Zealand’s
National Isotope Centre. Using the latest
accelerator mass spectrometry technology, this
laboratory provided the authors with a series
of possible date ranges for each textile, along
with corresponding confi dence intervals for
each potential range.4 Using this data, we then
determined the most likely date range for each
sampled work. This was done using the provenance
of each object, as well as information
gleaned from Vansina’s archival documents, the
published histories of the Kuba kingdom, and an
examination of textiles cared for by museums in
Belgium, Canada, and the United States.
What emerges from this interdisciplinary investigation
is a history of Kuba two-dimensional
design that begins in the eighteenth century and
ends in the early 1970s. Our research indicates
that two dramatic formal transformations occurred
over the course of this two-hundred-year
history. First, as the Kuba state grew and expanded,
the designs found on textiles created for the
kingdom’s ruling class became increasingly bold
and dynamic. Second, the growing complexity
and inventiveness of design was accompanied by
increasing color differentiation within the patterns
themselves. Textiles produced in the eighteenth
and early to mid nineteenth centuries are
defi ned by repeating patterns and subtle details
rendered in monochromatic colors that obscure
fi gure-ground relationships. By contrast, works
produced in the late nineteenth and early to mid
twentieth centuries are defi ned by large designs
embroidered or appliquéd in contrasting colors.
At the heart of these shifts in design are issues
of visibility and spectatorship. Who is the intended
audience for these textiles? And what is
that audience’s intended reaction? Although all
of the artworks included in the exhibition were
created to signify wealth and power—as scholars
from Emil Torday to Patricia Darish have documented—
the ways in which each pattern is executed
determines the individuals to whom that
status is broadcast. Take, for instance, the oldest
FIG. 2 (left): “Bakuba.”
Une brodeuse (“Bakuba.”
An embroideress).
Photograph by Casimir
Zagourski (1880–1941).
Pierre Loos Collection. Courtesy of
Andres Moraga Textile Art.
FIG. 3 (above): Skirt.
Kuba, Kasai Province, DR
Congo. 1804–1894 (date
range determined by
carbon-14 testing).
Raffi a palm fi ber. 569 x 66 cm.
Private collection. R.18060.3.
FIG. 4 (below): Overskirt
(detail). Kuba, Kasai
Province, DR Congo.
1912–1942 (date range
determined by carbon-14
testing).
Raffi a palm fi ber. 132.1 x 58.4 cm.
Private collection. R.18060.15.