For several years now, the University Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has been inviting area artists to display their work in conjunction with materials they’ve reviewed and selected from the UMCA’s extensive collection. The program’s name? Dialogue With the Collection.
The museum has also put together a number of exhibits organized by student curatorial teams, with the aim of making UMCA a true teaching museum that’s closely connected to students and their coursework.
But for its latest show, UMCA has developed an entirely new model: an exhibit drawn partly from the holdings of a private collector, the work of a New York artist, and a group of student curators.
For “5 Takes on African Art/42 Flags by Fred Wilson,” four UMass graduate students (and a Westfield State University professor), all from different fields, reviewed the enormous holdings of African and other tribal art of Charles Derby, a Northampton collector. Working with Derby, the students have each arranged separate stations of his art, grouped around different themes and their own interpretations of the work.
In concert with that, African American artist Fred Wilson, known for his installations and different interpretations of existing art, has created “Flags of Africa” — new paintings of 42 African national flags that have been stripped of their color, leaving just black and white lines and various symbols and shapes.
In exhibition notes, Wilson explains that removing the colors raises questions about what the flags signify — and whether they truly represent the people, history and geography of countries that until the mid 20th century were almost entirely controlled by European powers.
“This really began as an experiment,” said Loretta Yarlow, UMCA’s director, during a recent tour of the show. “There’s almost no one in this area that teaches [African art], so we wanted to take a different approach in curating the show.”
Yarlow had met Derby, a UMass alum, some years back and was impressed with his huge collection of African and Native American figurines, statues, masks and other artwork; Derby has acquired the work during a roughly 40-year career as a dealer, collector and appraiser of tribal art. But it wasn’t exactly clear to Yarlow at the time how the UMCA might exhibit some of Derby’s holdings.
“We thought about having one curator, maybe someone from the outside, do a show, but then it would just have been one person’s take,” she said.
Instead, she sought out some different curators: four UMass graduate students from different departments, and Imo Imeh, a Nigerian-American professor of art and art history at Westfield State University.
These five curators — Imeh served as an advisor and mentor to the students — all met in turn with Derby at his home to examine his holdings, talk with him about why and where he’d acquired them, and select some to display at UMCA.
“I said to Charlie, ‘What if we had these ingénues coming over who had never studied African art and didn’t really know anything about it?’ ” Yarlow said with a laugh. “I thought we could do a show with a really fresh perspective, and he agreed.”
Indeed, in an interview with the Gazette earlier this year, Derby said he’d greatly enjoyed talking with the students about his art collection and helping them select pieces for the UMCA show.
Different viewsThe UMCA exhibit takes up all the museum’s space — generally a smaller gallery at the museum holds a separate exhibit — to accommodate five different stations of Derby’s art, for which each of the curators pursued a specific theme. Wilson’s flag paintings, meantime, are mounted on the walls.
Kiara Hill, for instance, a doctoral student in African American Studies and Public History, created “(WOMB)AN,” an examination of femininity and womanhood in West African cosmology. She selected numerous figurines of women, some with long, conical breasts; they’re grouped with elaborately carved ceremonial staffs, used by male tribal leaders, that have tiny female figurines at their top.
“Because women’s bodies were believed to be imbued with supernatural capabilities, they were typically the subjects of various ceremonial and religious works,” Hill writes in exhibition notes.
Imeh, the Westfield State professor, concentrated on a belief system from the Yoruba people, from present-day Nigeria and Benin, called “ibeji,” which is the name of a minor god representing human twins. As notes at his station, called “Collective Memory,” explain, ibeji sculptures are crafted to honor a twin who has died and to protect the surviving sibling from the “restless spirit” of the deceased one.
This exhibit is filled with small, carefully sculpted figurines — some “dressed” in intricate coverings made of beads — that in most cases are similar but not identical. Imeh notes that these figurines offer a “philosophical portal” to West African and Yoruba ideas of how the living decide to remember the dead.
In some cases, Yarlow notes, the provenance of objects in Derby’s collection isn’t know. But the origins of many of the items in the UMCA exhibit have been identified, and the exhibit includes art from Nigeria, Zaire, Tanzania, the Ivory Coast, Liberia and other countries.
Elizabeth Upenieks, a graduate student in the history of art and architecture, examines the contrast between older African art and newer pieces, sometimes made for tourists by artists like Thomas Ona, a Nigerian artist of the early 20th century who carved small figurines such as a man riding a comically small bicycle.
In her exhibit space, called “Authenicity,” Upenieks notes that western biases, which tend to assume an older piece of “African art” is more valuable than a newer one, can get in the way of fully understanding African aesthetic traditions.
Yarlow notes that Wilson grapples with a similar idea with his flag paintings by stripping away their traditional colors, seeing them largely as a vestige of the colonial era. “I think his idea is [for viewers] to fill in the blanks,” she said.
The UMCA exhibit, which has been extended from its original closing date in December to run until April 29, has also hosted numerous visits by UMass classes as well as special events such as a talk by Charles Derby. Yarlow hopes to bring Wilson back to the exhibit next semester, too.
And she notes that Kiara Hill, the student curator, has had a transformational experience working on the show. “She was going to go into teaching, but now she says she wants to work in a museum,” she said.
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.
For more information on the UMCA exhibit, visit fac.umass.edu/UMCA/On line/. The UMCA will be closed Nov. 24-26 and Dec.11-Jan.22.