African Art Appears in Los Angeles

WHEN museums display African art and Modern art together, they generally do so to illustrate how seeing Africa’s arresting masks and fantastic figures helped Picasso and other Modern artists escape the constraints of Realism and move into Cubism, Surrealism and Dadaism.

But in a new gallery at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, African art is framed as a contemporary art form in its own right, not just an aesthetic enabler for a century of Modern artists. “Tradition as Innovation in African Art,” curated by Polly Nooter Roberts, an African art expert at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, is the debut of a partnership between the museums that will display African works in a prominent space at the plaza entrance to the Ahmanson Building’s Modern art collection.

This looks like that a permanent African collection will appear at LACMA. For those of you concerned in that thankful mood, you can start with [Michael Govan](C:~shares\dataRoot\MSWord\Non-Fiction\Journal\Michael Govan). This is the guy that was openly surprised about “no department of African art at LACMA when he became director in 2006.” He calls that “crazy”—I agree but it is also American tradition.

Now that yet another European-based “public” art institution has rediscovered its crazy racism, artists of color can go along with the “newness” of these revelations and heap praise and adulation for this newfound freedom. But there are traditional American ways to deal with this “problem”—here are just a few:

LACMA will establish a department of African Art—but just like the staff for UCLA’s African Arts it will be populated with qualified people of European descent. Indignant remarks about not being able to find qualified “people of color” will follow. Perhaps one of the ladies working in management at the CAAM can be put in charge of this department. They would be honored.
Some of the African art may be deemed “too good” for the public and may vanish into private collections. This is actually a compliment to the “modern” Africans that produced the work but is part of that same old story of effectively keeping them ‘secret.’ What really hurts is when some white dude graduates art school basically producing copies of these ‘hidden’ works and becomes the next Picasso. What’s worse is that young school children of color would have more of a chance seeing Picasso II on the class field trip than the original African communications.
LACMA may inadvertently build yet another channel to drain artifacts out of Africa (which many “modern” African artists are passionately in favor of) so that young people in the homelands of many of the artists may not learn about their bright neighbor. When you give me the choice of saving my life’s work with a bunch of coup Zombies dressed in camouflage or some nice guy (like [Michael Govan](C:~shares\dataRoot\MSWord\Non-Fiction\Journal\Michael Govan)) in Los Angeles, I’ll take Mikey.

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