The work in St. Louis Art Museum’s new exhibition has a continent full of stories.
“Narrative Wisdom and African Arts” was inspired in part by a chair whose carvings include masks and scenes of community life, such as women preparing food and men playing drums.
The 19th-century chair by a Chokwe artist in Angola is a “visitor favorite,” says Nichole N. Bridges, museum curator of the arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas.
Viewers naturally want to know about the carvings on the chair and what it represents, Bridges says. “What story does it tell?” people wonder.
These carvings of daily life help reinforce a narrative about the community and the chief’s authority over it, Bridges explains. The chair probably belonged to only a single chief (future ones would commission their own chairs), and shows that everyday activities from coming-of-age ceremonies to basic food production were under his control.
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One of about 150 pieces in “Narrative Wisdom,” the chair is a good example of how the exhibition highlights representational and pictoral art over abstract objects. With loans from more than 30 lenders, works include textiles, sculpture, paintings, drawings, photography and more. Previous sub-Saharan exhibitions at the museum have usually focused on a specific area or culture, but “Narrative Wisdom” is the first ticketed exhibition of sub-Saharan works organized by the St. Louis museum.
“It’s wonderful we have this great history of presenting very focused themes and subject matters,” Bridges says. But the new exhibit “presents a vast variety of artworks from across history, and also mediums and also arts made at all levels of the market.”
Some pieces have been made for a general audience, such as a zine, a small self-published magazine. Indeed, artwork ranges from the 13th to the 21st century, with pieces from East, West, Central and Southern Africa.
The museum states that “these arts facilitate, document, reinforce, or critique narratives pertaining to the legitimacy and legacy of leaders, memory of place, prescriptions for destiny and healing, and enduring ancestral wisdoms.”
A unifying element to these vast areas may be their history of oral traditions and music. So a “prelude” to the exhibition includes a group of musical instruments and an audio work by artist Emeka Ogboh called “Ties That Bind.” The orator in the work introduces the tradition of a griot, or storyteller, trained to recount the foundational history of a society, often performing to music, Bridges says.
Within the exhibit are pieces such as a 2018 photograph by Gosette Lubondo. In it, the photographer’s subject is a Congolese school building founded in colonial days by Christian Brothers missionaries, Bridges says. It was an elite school but now appears in disrepair.
After independence, and President Mobutu Sese Seko came to power, he changed the country’s name to Zaire and wanted the missionaries and other foreigners out. Lubondo’s photo, which shows students lined up in what appear to be uniforms, is “thinking about the colonial past and new possibilities going forward,” says Bridges.
The photographer even appears as a character in the piece, “Imaginary Trip II, No. 3.” She’s the person in a red dress.
Another piece of contemporary art in the exhibition is a finely detailed ink drawing “Return of the Spirits” by Julien Sinzogan of Benin. Even without seeing the drawing’s partner in the diptych, a viewer may have a good window into the narrative just from the contrast of dull brown ships with their colorful sails conveying various textile traditions of the African diaspora.
Bridges points out how the artist, trained as an architectural engineer, conveys realistic galleons used to transport captives for the African slave trade. The colorful sails, though, reference a joyful and celebratory return to Africa, she says.
Bridges, who interviewed Lubondo about his work, says the lines of the sails show links from African residents to the people in the diaspora — like an umbilical cord.
The curator says plans for the exhibition were conceived in 2018. A few years later, the project became the museum’s first to have a community advisory group of about a dozen people. (It has had teacher advisory groups before.) The advisory group resulted from recommendations of a museum’s study group to the board of commissioners in 2020.
Bridges said the group has had “amazing ideas about programming, audience development and community outreach.”
In connection with “Narrative Wisdom and African Arts” will be lectures, music and a production by the Black Rep. See for all events. The exhibition has a free “public preview” day Friday, Oct. 18, with drinks and a performance by David A.N. Jackson in Sculpture Hall.