Transformations In African Art

NEW HAVEN — An exhibition of African masks, sculpture and mixed media works selected from two private collections whose owners wish to remain anonymous continues at Yale University Art Gallery through March 25.

“Call And Response: Journeys of African Art” traces the way ideas and objects that originated in one ethnic group are adopted and reconfigured by other groups, both within the African continent and outside. Turn-of-the-century postcards, books, maps and textiles that help guide the viewer on a journey of changing forms, definitions and circumstances, augment the artworks.

Following a video in which one of the masks in the exhibition is shown in a masquerade performance, the objects are grouped more or less thematically. The first installation, organized by Yale doctoral candidate Sarah Adams, focuses on Ogbo women’s body painting, or ùri. A sculptured puppet shows how a young woman’s body was covered with elaborate patterns to make her more comely before marriage.

In the face of European missionary disapproval young women began to wear clothes and the custom of body painting disappeared. The designs, however, were adapted to other uses.

One Scottish missionary, Agnes Arnot, collected the designs as drawings on paper which were then used as templates for embroidery. Examples of such embroidered linens from the 1930s and 1940s, which, according to exhibit notes, “had a ready sale among Europeans all over Nigeria,” are in the exhibition.

Several examples of the festive masks associated with the Ode-lay society of late 20th Century Freetown, Sierra Leone, are in the exhibition. Ms Adams has also included a trunk containing materials related to the ongoing life of the society, some of them as close as Bridgeport.

Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz, another Yale doctoral candidate involved with the creation of the exhibit, was concerned with a nkisi, a type of religious object that exists in a three-dimensional and graphic form, both of which are on view.

In the Kongo culture the figures, in the shape of man or animal, have powerful healing and protective powers. The figures and related beliefs traveled in Africa, but it is particularly their adoption in Mr Ruiz-Martinez’s native Cuba that he traced for “Call And Response.”

One of the most concrete examples of the intercultural and cross-border influences in the exhibition is a crucifix from the capital of the ancient Kongo empire. In it, Mr Ruiz-Martinez points out, “One can clearly recognize the elements of the manner in which the cultural impact of the Kongo was felt in Portuguese iconography, and vice versa.”

Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 am to 5 pm; and Sunday, 1 to 6 pm. Yale University Art Gallery, on Chapel Street at York, can be contacted by calling 203/432-0611.