Grey Art Gallery at New York University
Curated by Lynn Gumpert, Director of the Grey Art Gallery. Written contributions by Lynn Gumpert, Jennifer S. Brown, Lydie Diakhaté, Janet Goldner, John Picton and Doran H. Ross. Artistic contributions by El Anatsui, Samuel Cophie, Sokari Douglass Camp, Atta Kwami, Grace Ndiritu, Nike Okundaye, Owusu-Ankomah, Yinka Shonibare, Nontsikelelo “Lolo” Veleko, Rikkie Wemega-Kwawu and Sue Williamson.
The NYU exhibition Poetics of Cloth emerged in the 2000s as part of a movement which aimed to unsettle mythologies of African art history as comprised exclusively of sculptural works. Its sister collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design without End, boasts many of the same artists, though African Textiles features more “traditional” 19th century works while Poetics of Cloth emphasizes contemporary artists’ use of fabrics in various media of art today. [1] Likely, these exhibitions’ collaborative articulation and reflection on such rich textile traditions signify the importance of Indigenous African craft and contemporary re-fashioning of the expressive medium. As Ghanaian born installation artist El Anatsui has observed: “The scope of meaning associated with cloth is so wide…. [It] is to the African what monuments are to Westerners.”[2] While perhaps a controversial assertion to equate the two vastly different productions, Anatsui’s parallel of tapestry and monument may serve a helpful model to understand varying aesthetic pillars of community.
Although Masai fabrics and West African kente cloths are often considered part of the narrative fabric of African and African American history, less historical attention has focused on conceptualizing textiles as more than cultural identity markers. As part of the effort to disrupt antique notions of African art as purely functionalist, fabric-inspired film and photography as well as installation works of Dutch wax prints were included in the exhibition, with contributions from collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and UCLA Fowler Museum.[3] Textile patterns were woven, dyed, printed and painted, and many critics noted that viewers could not overlook the prominence of “band” motifs often fashioned with weaving looms, which art critic Karen Rosenberg likens to the importance of the grid in Western paintings of postwar scenes. [4]
Multi-media pieces deemed particularly striking by reviewing critics were Sue Williamson’s “Pass the Parcel” and Grace Ndiritu’s “Still Life.” In a series of 21 collages, Williamson draws the viewer’s eyes to the traditional attire worn as evidence in the rape trial of President Jacob Zuma of the African National Congress. Testifying his innocence, Zuma drew upon examples of local cultural initiation rites, citing that as a Zulu warrior, such dress summoned his sexual advances and assault of the woman in question. [5] Such a difficult invocation by the wax-print garment warrants thoughtful reflection about the role of aesthetic legacies in African politics of identity today. Additionally, alongside renown photographers Malick Sidibé, Seydou Keïta, American-born artist Grace Ndiritu’s work holds its own with poignant film shorts regarding the politics of dress in silence. Encased in a room with four walls of textile imagery, the viewer watches the artist wrapping and unraveling her body in various lengths of fabrics, immersed in rich colours and detailed patterned cloth. The donning of “traditional” African print on a Diasporic body also raises possibility of a transnational aesthetic, framing the Pan-Africanist assertion of self in current cultural contexts.
The Nightingale
Grade Ndiritu 2003
Untitled [Olympia]
Seydou Keita 1950s?
Regrettably, raving critics evade questions about global dimensions of the exhibition. The consideration of clear parallels in Arabian, Asian and Indigenous American textiles might illuminate a universal reality in fabric’s employment as aesthetic and narrative body. Additionally, such a contextualizing frame in the exhibition would allow curators to emphasize distinguishing characteristics of African textiles in creation, production and encounters between artists and citizens in public sectors. Nevertheless, visionary in its multimedia engagements with African textiles, The Poetics of Cloth honors its name in expansively defining works of fabric as rich legacies of aesthetic adornment and ultimately reveals the contributions of textiles to complex modes of cultural re-fashioning on the African continent.
still shot from film
Rikki Wemega-Kwawu
Akosombo Textiles Limited 2007
Ancient Cloth VIII
El Anatsui 1993
-Kyrah M. Daniels
[1] Karen Rosenberg. “African Art, Modern and Traditional: Seductive Patterns From a Rich Palette,” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/arts/design/10text.html?pagewanted=print.
[2] http://www.nyu.edu/greyart/upcomingexh.html
[3] http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_new=26164&int_sec=2
[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/arts/design/10text.html
[5] http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_new=26164&int_sec=2
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