Renewed Purpose:African Artifacts Resuscitated at the MET

At the inception of the 20th century, African art flourished under America’s cultural lens. New York’s avant-garde coterie were busy discovering and commingling works into private collections following the ground-breaking Armory Show of 1913. Fast forward decades later, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have set those wheels back in motion. 

 

Museum curators retrieved several works in the forms of sculptures, photographs and paintings with the exhibit, African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde. On display for art aficionados are some 40 wood sculptures from West and Central Africa, punctuated with pieces by acclaimed virtuosos like Alfred Stieglitz, Charles Sheeler, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and more. They also enrapture enthusiasts with a plethora of compilations from the period’s most prominent African art collectors like Alain Leroy Locke and Marius de Zayas. The selected furnishings work together in an evocative manner, conjuring up the original context in which  art connoisseurs first experienced them nearly a century ago.

 

The thematic exhibition finds its stride in shifting between America’s discovery for African art to its acceptance in mainstream institutions and the Harlem Renaissance. Synergy is key, considering the exhibit’s purpose over each part. The purpose: to expound on an intricate past by reuniting and drawing new connections between its relics. 

 

Favorite Connections: Stieglitz’s 1914 photographs of his inaugural installation focused on the artifacts as works of art in New York compliments Sheeler’s photos of Picasso’s 1923 exhibition, Recent Paintings. The former served as an impetus for the latter. In addition, the juxtaposition of American period painter Melvin Gray Johnson’s Negro Masks (a piece de resistance) with the Nigerian and Democratic Republic of the Congo masks that inspired the piece is beguiling.

 

 

FYI: The exhibit runs until April 14 in the museum’s Michael C. Rockefeller Special Exhibition Gallery. The museum offers tours, with a public lecture on Feb. 8. Check out their website at www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2012/%20african-art?utm_source=homepage&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=africanart

 

 

By Clarissa Hamlin

 

Source: metmuseum.org/about-the-museum/press-room/exhibitions/2012/african-art-new-york-and-the-avant-garde