MUSEUM news
56
ABOVE: Brewing vessel.
Luo, Kenya. 20th century.
Earthenware. H: 67.3 cm.
Newark Museum, Members’ Fund
purchase, inv. 2004.4.7.
BELOW: El Anatsui
(b. Ghana, 1944), Many
Came Back, 2005.
Nsukka, Nigeria.
Aluminum (liquor bottle tops),
copper wire. 214.4 x 292.1 cm.
Newark Museum, Members’ Fund
purchase, inv. 2005.34.
© El Anatsui.
The Arts of
Global Africa
NEWARK—The Newark Museum’s
African art collection ranks
among the oldest and most diverse
in the United States, representing
the breadth and vitality
of artistic creativity throughout
the continent. Its holdings comprise
nearly 4,000 objects of
ritual, ceremonial, and daily use,
as well as popular urban and fi ne
arts. They include outstanding
examples of masks and fi gural
sculpture, textiles and dress, pottery,
jewelry, furniture, photography, and paintings.
The works range from historic artifacts, primarily dating
to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century,
to examples of contemporary artistic creativity.
The continental scope of the collection—especially its
inclusion of art from northern, eastern, and southern
African countries—is a particular strength. Its holdings
in these areas are unmatched today by most art museums,
which historically focused on sculpture from
west and central Africa in developing their collections.
In keeping with its long-held commitment to living
artists, the museum’s African collection has a growing
manded a technical understanding of colorfast dyes
through the use of mordants (dye fi xatives). By the
sixteenth century, Indian cottons were in high demand
around the world. Trade with Southeast Asia and Indonesia,
in particular, was spurred by the hunger for
spices—namely pepper, cloves, nutmeg, and mace.
Trade Cloth from the Coromandel Coast, on view at
the Honolulu Museum of Art through April 8, 2018,
explores these infl uential trade textiles. It features
sembagi, a Malay term for these painted, printed
cloths that were personalized for the Indonesian market.
Highly coveted, they were signifi ers of prestige,
status, and accumulated wealth. They took on particular
signifi cance in Indonesia, where textiles were
sacred heirloom objects (pusaka), ascribed protective
and healing properties. Central to rites of passage
ceremonies, these fabrics doubled as canopies, backdrops,
awnings, and fl oor coverings.
LEFT: Door for Bwiti
temple.
Tsogo, Gabon. Late
19th–early 20th
century.
Wood, pigment, metal.
H: 80 cm.
Ex New England private
collection, before 2003;
Norman Hurst, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, until 2003.
Newark Museum, Membership
Endowment Fund purchase,
inv. 2003.12.
LEFT: Divination bowl,
agere ifa.
Yoruba, Ekiti region,
Nigeria. 20th century.
Wood. H: 29.9 cm.
Ex John Cotton Dana, by at
least 1924.
Newark Museum, purchase,
inv. 24.2458.