Women on top

The Museum of African Tribal Art, and a look at what’s to come

By Chris Thompson

“Agbogho Nmuo!”, installation view from the Museum of African Tribal Art.

As the month that brings us Mothers’ Day and Memorial Day, May seemed to Oscar Mokeme to be the most fitting time to stage the Museum of African Tribal Arts’ exhibition “The Role of Women in African Society.” The museum’s founder, curator and proprietor, Mokeme conceived the idea behind the show exactly one year ago. It grew out of his desire to “honor the memory” of his mother after her death last May. As he considered what such a show might look like, gradually the possibility began to take shape of an exhibition that looked at the roles and contributions of women in African societies in a broader perspective. Indeed, according to him, he hopes that the exhibition will raise questions about the representation of women that extends beyond sub-Saharan Africa. But even as its scope expanded, Mokeme’s intensely personal point of departure for the show remains a palpable presence.

In the back corner of the gallery, he has constructed a shrine to the spirit of the earth; he explains that “the earth is a woman according to African tradition.” A large slender wooden mask sits atop the shrine, embedded with tiny shells and miniature sculpted faces, and adorned with several carved standing figures. He explains that this mask represents the way in which this sacred maternal earth contains all of the resources and necessities of life, holds the bodies of our ancestors, and supports the lives of we who live on it and who need to learn how to respect the earth and to share it with each other. The mask would be used ritually to remind people of the urgency of learning these lessons.

Underneath it, the shrine holds symbolic offerings made in order to appease and honor this maternal presence. Mokeme explains the importance in African societies not of some abstract notion of “woman” but of real women, ancestral as well as living: mothers, wives, daughters, and grandmothers, whose role he describes as “especially vital.” On the placard at the foot of the installation is a photograph of a white coffin sitting in the ground, about to be covered over with earth. He placed this here, he says, to emphasize the point that we come from and inevitably return to the earth. It’s a point that becomes infinitely more poignant when he notes that the coffin in the photograph is his mother’s.

The placard’s lengthy text, a compelling cross between an explanation and an exhortation, tells us that the earth was here before us, will outlast us, will take us in again when we die. Mokeme arranges these traditional objects with his own reflections upon them in such a way that their ethical, aesthetic, and spiritual resonances can reinforce rather than disrupt one another. This permits the show to deliver the placard’s message with unusually persuasive force: “Be gentle with the earth and share the resources wisely.” “Be gentle with your self for your soul is all you have. Respect the earth and the earth will reward you with an abundance of good fortune.”

I must have done something right by Mother Earth in order to have had the good fortune for both Nigerian artist Bola Oyetunji and I to visit the Museum of African Tribal Arts on the same day. Oyetunji had come to see the exhibition and to talk about her work with Mokeme. She is an artist in the widest sense of the word, working across a range of media from etching to embroidery, fashion design to sculpture.

Referring to one of her works, an ornate stylized copper relief sculpture depicting a woman using a motorcycle to take goods to a market, she says: “What I really want in my work, or you could say my own idea of ‘art,’ is to provide images of what is actually happening in the world around me, in my country, in my neighborhood. Without these kinds of pictures, this history of ours that is changing so quickly would be lost. I don’t base my work on things that are ‘African,’ but on this attempt to create objects that can preserve — but also let people relive — history. If I go someplace else in the world and see something of that culture, I use that, too.”

Asked if there were a sculpture or implement from Mokeme’s exhibition that she found particularly striking, Oyetunji explained that she found the cohesion of the show as a whole most impressive. “As an artist and a Nigerian, I think everything here is superb. These objects are not things that are easy to come by. The things here are from older generations. They have existed for centuries. They are all striking, unique things.”

 

Here are highlights of other striking things that some of Maine’s museums and galleries have planned for the summer months.

 

June Fitzpatrick Gallery: Through June 30, those who have followed his art reviews over the years will have a rare opportunity to see Philip Isaacson’s artwork. Under the title “Fragments,” Isaacson will exhibit at Fitzpatrick’s High Street gallery a series of photographs of architectural elements, details of buildings viewed from odd angles which have the look and feel of tight abstract paintings. In August, at her MECA gallery, Fitzpatrick will have a show of Leonard Baskin’s woodcuts, a show she calls “one of her most important of the year.” Only days before his death, Baskin completed the last of a group of woodcuts he had undertaken in response to poet Ted Hughes’s interpretation of three Greek tragedies. The never-before-seen prints will join a rare woodcut from 1961, one of the earliest examples of Baskin’s exploration of that medium, to create what promises to be an intense and powerful exhibition. It will run concurrently with a kind of homage to Baskin offered by the work of two of Baskin’s star students, Tom Cornell and Dorothy Schwartz, at Fitzpatrick’s High Street gallery.

 

Filament Gallery: “Black and White and Red Inside,” a show of the recent work of Abby Manock, opened at the relocated and revamped Filament Gallery on June 1 and runs through July 14. Manock’s work in the show consists of a series of drawings all executed between April 1 and May 22 of this year, each of which pushes its own narrative potential in order to try to suggest events that preceded or may follow the drawing itself in the near future. Filament proprietor Jill Dalton describes them as an “x-ray vision of daily existence.”

Hudson Museum, UMaine Orono: Bringing together poetry, photography, and artwork by children at the Tibetan Homes School for refugee Tibetans, “Echoes Across the Himalayas” stages a thoughtful and provocative look at the lives of the Tibetan communities in exile in India. The show runs from June 19 through September 1.

 

Aucocisco Gallery: More widely known for his career on Broadway, Zero Mostel always considered himself a painter first and foremost. His refusal to participate with the House UnAmerican Activities inquisitions in the 1950s got him blacklisted; unable to find acting work, he dedicated himself to painting full-time. Mostel’s eclectic, introspective works will be at Aucocisco through June 30.

 

Institute of Contemporary Art, Maine College of Art: On August 16, the ICA will open its exhibition “Two Photographers: Paul D’Amato and Brooks Kraft.” This is the first exhibition of Kraft’s photography; a Contributing Photographer for Time magazine, he has covered three U.S. Presidential election campaigns, and political happenings all over the planet. High points of this show include photographs of Nelson Mandela in a volatile South Africa just before its first post-Apartheid democratic elections; and his photographs of his months on now-President G.W. Bush’s campaign trail. The charged political dramas captured in Kraft’s work will find a resonant counterpoint in D’Amato’s photographs from the last three years, ranging from images of Meý’s Social Clubs in Portland and Boston to images of life along the Mexican/American border. All embody his belief “that the world is much more interesting, beautiful, and surreal than any idea we could possibly have of it.” Amen. “Two Photographers” runs through October 18.

Icon Gallery, Brunswick: Icon’s summer begins June 9 with a show of Morris David Dorenfield’s textile work. On view through July 7, “Banded Tapestries,” Dorenfield’s second solo show at Icon, is a survey of the artist’s vibrant tapestries made over the past 20 years. In mid-August, Icon shows the work of painters Mark Wethli and Katherine Bradford.

Maine Coast Artists, Rockland: From August 8 through 29, The Center for Maine Contemporary Art probes the presence of place with its “Haystack: Pivotal Transformations” show. Commemorating Haystack’s 50th anniversary, the show will bring together 40 artists whose work has been changed dramatically from their time spent at this artistic nexus of the Northeast.

 

Portland Museum of Art: “American Impressionism: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum” runs from June 21 through October 21. The PMA’s summer blockbuster includes 52 works by the likes of such American painters as Mary Cassatt, James McNeill Whistler, Abbott Thayer, and Childe Hassam, whose prints and graphic works will be the subject of a smaller PMA exhibit running from June 9 through September 3.

Zero Station: From June 16 through July 22, Zero Station will show Lynn White’s disturbing domestic portraits made out of Band-aids, along with a series of new paintings and works on paper by Grace DeGennaro.

 

The Clown: From July 1 through 29, The Clown will present a solo show of the work of Leigh Li-Yun Wen. Wen’s remarkable, intricate paintings explore the relationships between the patterns and forces of nature and the cultural collisions between the Taiwan in which she grew up and the America in which she now lives.

Hay Gallery: Three red lobster, crowd toward a television to watch a cartoonish giraffe gawk at them. It’s not a scene from a zoologist’s acid trip, but a description of Carol Warner’s intriguing tiny embroidery entitled “Outer Space Invades Inner Space Seeking Virtual Space.” For the Hay’s July 17 through August 18 show, she will exhibit her embroideries along with a body of metal sculptures. She will be joined by photographer Dennis Shultz, whose ethereal homages to Mother Earth in the form of some striking platinum prints, together with Warner’s work, should make for a genuinely consciousness-expanding show.

 

Chris Thompson can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com.