Robert Goldwater Library blog

Rare Africa Photos Go Online, Open New Options for Africa Research

From a press release issued by Northwestern University

EVANSTON, Ill. --- This week -- for the first time ever -- a searchable collection of thousands of rare photographs chronicling Europe's colonization of East Africa becomes available to anyone with an Internet connection anywhere in the world, thanks to the efforts of staff at Northwestern University Library.

Turkana. Winterton Collection of East African Photographs, Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, Northwestern University, Evanston. Object 19-23-1. 29 June, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2166.DL/inu-wint-19-23-1.

The Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs: 1860-1960 began attracting the interest of Africa scholars and others in 2002 when it was acquired by Northwestern's Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies. The library officially launches the online collection today (June 25).

"The 7,000-plus photographs in this extraordinary collection document the changing relationships among Africans and between Africans and Europeans during 100 years of dramatic historic change," says Herskovits Library curator David Easterbrook.

They include formal and informal portraits of Africans and their colonizers, photos of slaves and slave traders, and images depicting the building of railroads and urban areas and of traditional African life.

They represent the work of explorers, colonial officials, settlers, missionaries, military officers, travelers and early commercial photographers.

Visitors to the site can search for photographs by subject or browse them in a way that replicates how British collector Winterton organized the collection into 65 albums, scrapbooks and boxes. A "browsing feature" developed by Northwestern University Library technology specialists, for example, reproduces the experience of flipping through a photo album's pages.

Jonathan Glassman, a Northwestern associate professor of history in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and specialist in 19th- and 20th- century East Africa and comparative race and slavery, says the collection's special value lies in its unusual subject matter.

"The most familiar photographs from this era tend to dwell on what photographers considered East Africa's glamorous aspects -- its spectacular wildlife, landscapes, settler life or the occasional posed portrait of an African sultan or Maasai warrior," he says.

 "What stands out about the collection is the large number of items that document prosaic matters -- matters that are precisely the most difficult for the student of African history to get a handle on," adds Glassman.

Because the images are tagged with extensive metadata, they can be searched by date or keywords. A school group viewing the site in its pilot stage, for example, asked Easterbrook to see if the collection included any photos relating to President Obama's ancestry. The result: 31 photos of people and places were found.

According to Easterbrook, photos going back as far as the 1860s are extremely rare in the history of photography in Africa, and opportunities to see and study them are rarer still. The creation of the digital Winterton site changes that.

One of its oldest photographs depicts a Zanzibar slave market circa 1860. Although faded and in poor condition, the photo can be viewed online in detail. It is one of many images in the collection relating to slavery and the slave trade.

Among them is a portrait of Tippu Tip, a businessman, plantation owner and advisor to the Sultans of Zanzibar. Of African and Arab descent, he was an active slave trader even after the British abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833.

To optimize its value as an education tool for students of all ages, the online collection was designed in consultation with a group of kindergarten to high school educators and members of Northwestern's own renowned Program of African Studies.

In addition to explaining how elementary and high school teachers can use the collection for classroom projects and curricula, the online site links to other resources on teaching about Africa.

Generous funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services made it possible for Northwestern University Library not only to digitize the Winterton Collection images but also to design innovative tools to preserve and display them in electronic form.

With today's launch, the Winterton Collection becomes the third Herskovits Library collection available online. The others are a collection of 113 antique African maps dating from the 16th to the early 20th century at http://www.library.northwestern.edu/govinfo/collections/mapsofafrica/

and a collection of 590 posters reflecting the culture and politics of contemporary African nations at http://www.library.northwestern.edu/africana/collections/posters/

These and other digital collections are part of an innovative digital repository being designed by Northwestern University Library to most effectively preserve and display electronic text, visual, audio and video materials for online access.

Northwestern's Herskovits Library of African Studies is home to the world's largest separate collection of Africana materials.

NYTimes Review: African and Oceanic Art From the Barbier-Mueller Museum, "Lesson and Feast"

Photo: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

More Photos >

via NYTimes Art Review | 'African and Oceanic Art From the Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva':

Putting ‘Primitive’ to Rest

By HOLLAND COTTER

Published: June 4, 2009

In the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum you’ll find a tiny African copper relief that probably predates, and would surely have awed, the great Lorenzo Ghiberti. You’ll encounter a bust of a Nigerian beauty to rival Nefertiti; an Oceanic Apollo with the physique of an Olympian; and a Micronesian statuette that is, with its stacks of faceted planes, Brancusi before Brancusi.

These objects, along with 32 others, make up the exhibition called “African and Oceanic Art From the Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva: A Legacy of Collecting.” The show, an unabashed masterpiece display, is not only a gold mine of historical data and a connoisseur’s delight, but also a reminder of how perceptions evolve — a mere few decades ago everything here was referred to as “primitive art.”

This was a capacious category. It covered African, Oceanic and North American Indian material, as well as Pre-Columbian art from Central and South America and all things “tribal” from everywhere else. Only fairly recently have the political dimensions of “primitive” begun to be fully sorted out and reckoned with.

Meanwhile, long-established museum collections built on that catch-all concept are still with us, changed now in their thinking if not necessarily in their form.

The Barbier-Mueller Museum represents one such collection; the Rockefeller Wing, with origins in Nelson A. Rockefeller’s 1957 Museum of Primitive Art, another. At the Met the two converge, complementing and extending each other. In one sense the result is an old-fashioned sampler display of one-tribe-one-style sculptural types: a classic reliquary figure from Gabon; a textbook New Ireland mask; and so on.

At the same time, by bringing certain comparable pieces from two different collections together, the show is an invitation to alter our habits of looking. We are encouraged to retain a sense of the context and history of objects, but to pay more than usual attention to interpretive inventiveness and formal finesse: in short, to get a sense of the many things that “great” in art based on non-Western models can mean.

In the Barbier-Mueller exhibition that spectrum is wide and deep. The collection was started in the early 20th century by Josef Mueller (1887-1977), the son of a Swiss industrialist. A young man with a hankering for the vie de bohème, he moved to Paris in 1907. Not being an artist himself, he became a collector, buying Picassos hot from the studio, and in due course buying what Picasso was buying: African and Oceanic art.

[read on...]

AAOA authors in recent publications

Prachtvolle Federarbeiten: eine wenig bekannte Kunstform aus Alt Peru
By Heidi King
A4 no. 7 (02/08): p. 52-55, p. V-VI (English)

Published in conjunction with the exhibition "Radiance from the Rain Forest: Featherwork in Ancient Peru", held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through Sept. 1, 2008.

Magnificent Facades: Paintings & Architecture by Abelam Artists
By Virginia-Lee Webb
Tribal Art no. 52 (summer 2009): p. 30.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title held in the Mezzanine Gallery of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, through the end of 2009.

Painting of Faces Representing Butterflies on Facade of Ceremonial House, 1958-59, photographed by J. Anthony Forge (PSC 2007.28) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Michael C.Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Purchase 1960-1961

African and Oceanic Art from the Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva: A Legacy of Collecting

Forehead Ornament (Kapkap)
Western Solomon Islands, 19th century
Tridacna shell, turtle shell, fiber; Diam: 4 3/4 in. (12 cm)
Provenance: H. Gibson, England, before 1893; Royal United Services Institute Museum, London, 1893; James Hooper, England, before 1979; [Christie's, London 1980], Barbier-Mueller collection, sin

ce 1980

African and Oceanic Art from the Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva: A Legacy of Collecting
June 2, 2009–September 27, 2009
Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, 1st floor

	View images from this exhibition.

The collections of African and Oceanic art in the Barbier-Mueller Museum in Geneva, begun in the 1920s by Josef Mueller and continued by Jean Paul Barbier-Mueller, represent the culmination of more than eight decades of wide-ranging collecting of works from both regions. Presenting more than thirty highlights from the Barbier-Mueller’s holdings of African and Oceanic sculpture, most never before displayed in the United States, this exhibition explores a rich legacy of connoisseurship. The African works in the exhibition—sculpture and masks from western, eastern, and central Africa, from miniature to monumental in scale, made of wood, ivory, metal, and terracotta—illustrate both the creativity of the continent’s artists and the discerning eye of the collectors. The Oceanic works, an array of rare and spectacular objects that exemplify the breadth of achievement by artists from across the Pacific, include a striking group of figures, masks, and decorative art from Polynesia, New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Indonesia, and other areas.
Accompanied by a catalogue. 

The exhibition is made possible by Vacheron Constantin.
It was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in collaboration with the Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva. 

Precolumbian architecture in photographs, from Charnay to today

An exhibit of vintage and contemporary architectural photographs, "Sacred Architecture in the Americas", is now on display at Throckmorton Fine Art in New York City through June 20. (Throckmorton, 145 E. 57th St. 212-223-1059)

Martin Chambi, Panoramic View of Machu Pichu, c. 1930s Gelatin silver print (Inv# 49092)
Image from Throckmorton Fine Art

The web site includes a slide show of fifteen photographs from the exhibition featuring Desiré Charnay, Martin Chambi, Hugo Brehme and Marilyn Bridges.

From the press release:

The photographs included in the exhibit are from a wide span of time, from the late nineteenth century to the beginnings of the twenty-first century. Thus, the photographers approached the sacred architecture of the Americas differently. Some early images, such as those by Désiré Charnay and William Henry Jackson, were the outgrowth of expeditions seeking to “discover” the unknown. Photographs were documentary-like, seeking to inform and dazzle the public. Other photographs, such as those by Hugo Brehme, are couched in a pictorialism that invites a pleasant emotional response. The images of Martín Chambi are emblematic of intellectuals’ efforts in the 1920s and 1930s to reassert the values and accomplishment of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Marilyn Bridges uses the technology of the day to take aerial photographs, giving us views of ruins that we otherwise would never see. Each photograph in the exhibit is informed and enriched by the circumstances of its creation, and the skills of the artist behind the image.

Manuscripts from Timbuktu on exhibit in the Goldwater Library

On Friday, May 15, the Goldwater Library hosted a viewing and presentation of medieval Arabic manuscripts from West Africa. Staff from across the Museum--from curatorial deparments that included AAOA, Medieval, and Islamic, to the Objects and Paper Conservation departments and the Libraries--were invited to examine the works on display and share professional expertise with their West African counterparts. (See our earlier post.)

The event was coordinated with the Ford Foundation by Alisa LaGamma, Curator in the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas (AAOA).

The manuscripts, all drawn from the Mamma Haidara Library in Timbuktu, were brought to New York City by M. Abdel Kader Haïdara (left), curator of the library and Executive President of the Association Tombouctienne de Sauvegarde et de Valorisation des Manuscrits et pour la Défense de la Culture Islamique (SAVAMA-DCI).

He was accompanied by Margie Reese, Ford Program Officer, and Dr. Adhiambo Odaga, who heads Ford’s office in West Africa.

The sixteen manuscripts represented a wide-ranging sample of the over 5,000 manuscripts held by the Mamma Haidara Library, including treatises on the Qur'an, hadith, religion, mathematics, astronomy, prosody, government and history. The library, founded in the sixteenth century, has remained in the same family for its entire history. Mr. Haïdara is the ninth great-grandson of its founder. The oldest surviving manuscript in the library, a Qur'an, dates from 546 H. (CE 1151/52).

THE AFTERNOON'S PROGRAM began with a video showcasing the  Association's modern conservation facilities, funded in part from a grant of the government of Dubai. Following the video Mr. Haïdara answered questions from the MMA staff on conservation methods and training as well as the composition of the paper used in medieval Timbuktu and materials used in the preservation process.

Mr. Haïdara walked the audience through the manuscripts on display, highlighting the scholarly nature of the work; its physical qualities such its construction, calligraphy and in some cases illumination; and its importance to both its original and modern-day readers.

Perhaps the most unusual as well as the most handsome manuscripts on display was a fifteenth-century edition of the Qur'an (left)--which Mr. Haïdara characterized as perhaps the most precious in the library's collection, both for its content and its beauty. All the more remarkable is its foundation: fish skin. Fish, unlike wood pulp, is a plentiful commodity in West Africa.

Another manuscript demonstrated the resourcefulness demanded by local scribes in light of the scarcity of paper. The treatise, on Arabic grammar, was written over the travel diaries of Major Alexander Gordon Laing (1793-1826), an English [Scottish, actually] traveler to the region reputed to be the first European to reach Timbuktu. Both texts were of comparable value to the contemporary scholar, asserted Mr. Haïdara.

After a question-and-answer session, the guests were invited to browse the display and to speak directly with Mr. Haïdara and the representatives from the Ford Foundation.

The presentation coincided with the Ford Foundation's annual review of its project grantees. The Foundation provides continued support to SAVAMA-DCI, a Malian association of private Islamic libraries, "to raise awareness about the poor condition of the manuscripts; restore documents and renovate storage environments; encourage the scholarly exchange necessary to interpret and learn from the manuscripts; and provide sustainable funding for SAVAMA-DCI," according to a Foundation press release.

You can see set of photographs taken at the event, including a selection of the manuscripts on display, on the Goldwater Library's Flickr account.

Ross Day, Museum Librarian, The Robert Goldwater Library; Abdel Kader Haïdara; Erika Hauser, Senior Library Associate, The Robert Goldwater Library

EH, we salute you!

 Congratulations to goldwaterlibrary.org blogger extraordinaire Erika Hauser on the bestowal of the Master of Science in Library and Information Science degree from Pratt Institute. Woo-hoo!

-- Her fellow bloggers Ross & Joy

Manuscripts of Timbuktu: selected resources

On Friday, May 15, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will host a series of manuscripts from an important library in Timbuktu, Mali. These selected items, which date from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, represent a small portion of the extensive manuscript holdings in public and private libraries in Timbuktu, Mali. As part of a conservation initiative of the Ford Foundation, they will be brought to New York from Timbuktu by one of the foundation's grantees Abdel Kader Haidara, curator of the Mamma Haidara Library.

The visit will be an opportunity for those involved with this conservation effort to meet with curatorial, conservation and library colleagues in the Museum to share in a dialogue on the care and significance of these important cultural treasures.

The Timbuktu manuscripts are the focus of a number of ongoing conservation projects. In conjunction with the visit to the Museum, The Goldwater Library has compiled the following selected list of electronic and print resources.

Expedition guide Isa Mohammed holds a 500-year-old manuscript in Timbuktu, Mali. Photograph copyright Chris Rainier. (source)

Projects & Participating Organizations

Libraries of Timbuktu

This extensive web site includes links to the individual participating libraries and collections; a bibliography of Timbuktu; related institutions and resources; and an archive of press coverage (some links are no longer live).

The Timbuktu Manuscripts Project was initiated through a collaboration between Norwegian Universities (NUFU), the Ahmed Baba Institute in Timbuktu (IHERIAB), and the National Research Council of Mali (CNRST). Through a grant from NORAD and the Ford Foundation, the project was launched in the year 2000. The Timbuktu Manuscripts Project is the first UNESCO MEMORY of the WORLD Project and the first NEPAD Cultural Project.

• Sauvegarde et Valorisation des Manuscrits pour la Défense de la Culture Islamique (SAVAMA-DCI) (French language version of web site)

Timbuktu Educational Foundation / About

Aluka: Manuscripts of Timbuktu (download pdf)

Examples

Ancient Manuscripts from the Desert Libraries of Timbuktu (2004, Library of Congress online exhibition)

The manuscripts on view are from the Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library and the Library of Cheick Zayni Baye of Boujbeha, two of the most noteworthy institutions in the Timbuktu area ... The Library is also pleased that copies of these manuscripts will be deposited in its collections and will be available for use by researchers and scholars.

Unesco Memory of the World Project

This project, financed by Luxembourg, aims at ensuring the safeguarding of, and widely access to, the priceless handwritten cultural heritage both existing in the public and the private collections in the area of Timbuktu.

World Digital Library

The WDL was developed by a team at the U.S. Library of Congress, with contributions by partner institutions in many countries; the support of the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); and the financial support of a number of companies and private foundations. From the Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library

Islamic Manuscripts from Mali (Library of Congress)

Islamic Manuscripts from Mali features 32 manuscripts from the Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library and the Library of Cheick Zayni Baye of Boujbeha, both in Timbuktu, Mali.

Slavery and Manumission Manuscripts of Timbuktu (Center for Research Libraries, Cooperative Africana Microform Project (CAMP), Timbuktu Manuscript Digitization Project)

A recent project rose out of the research of John Hunwick into a private collection at the Bibliothèque Commémorative Mama Haidara in Timbuktu, Mali, of 19th century manuscripts relating to slavery and manumission in Timbuktu. The materials, in Arabic, provide documentation on Africans in slavery in Muslim societies (a field much neglected in U.S. research).

West African Arabic Manuscripts Project (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

AMMS is a bi-lingual (English and Arabic) database that was developed at the University of Illinois in the late 1980s to describe a collection of Arabic manuscripts in southern Mauritania (Boutilimit). It subsequently has been used to catalogue seven other West African collections including the manuscript libraries at the Institut Mauritanien de Recherche Scientifique, Northwestern University, and the Centre Ahmad Baba in Timbuctu.

In the Popular Press

Malian manuscripts digitized (goldwaterlibrary.org)

Project Digitizes Works From the Golden Age of Timbuktu (2008); Timbuktu Hopes Ancient Texts Spark a Revival (2007) (NYTimes)

The Rush to Save Timbuktu's Crumbling Manuscripts (Spiegel Online, August 2008)

Saving the Timbuktu Manuscripts (Southafrica.info (International Marketing Council of South Africa (IMC)), October 2005)

Reclaiming the Ancient Manuscripts of Timbuktu (National Geographic News, May 2003)

For Further Reading

The Hidden Treasures of Timbuktu: Rediscovering Africa's Literary Culture / John O. Hunwick and Alida Jay Boye ; Photographs by Joseph Hunwick. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2008.

Felipe Solís, Mexican museum director, dies

(Photo: EFE/Mauricio Marat / Photo source)

Felipe R. Solís Olguín, since 2000 the director of the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, died on Thursday, April 23, from an apparent heart attack, according to several published accounts. (Previous reports suggested he had been suffering from flu-like symptoms.) He was 64.

Solis was born in 1944 and was associated with the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) since 1972. His archaeological fieldwork as well as his academic specialty concentrated on Mexica culture, but his writings and exhibit curation covered the entire Mexican archaeological record. Author of over 200 scholarly articles and 30 monographs and exhibition catalogs, he was instrumental in the "Mexico, Splendor of Thirty Centuries" exhibition (1990-91) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; "Aztecs" (2002-04) in London and Berlin; "The Aztec Empire" (2004-05) in Bilbao and New York's Guggenheim Museum; and most recently "Teotihuacan, City of Gods".

A comprehensive bibliography of his works appears on the blog Publishing Archaeology.

• Find titles by Felipe Solis in WATSONLINE / WorldCat

The Tropics exhibition comes to Cape Town

The exhibition The Tropics: Views from the Middle Ground is now on view at the Iziko South African National Gallery through June 14.

The Tropics, which first opened last year in Brasilia and Rio de Janeiro and then in a much larger incarnation in Berlin, unites 85 works of contemporary art by 39 artists along with 200 objects from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the tropical America from the collections of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin.

"The issue at the center of the exhibition," writes Klaus-Dieter Lehmann in his overview of the show's concept,

is a re-estheticization of the Tropics. The aim of this re-estheticization is "to bring the cultural weight of the tropical natural environments to bear in view of the overwhelming power of political and economic discourses." It is artistic expression which is becoming emancipated here vis-à-vis the daily poverty debates and superficial banalizations; it allows approximations that neither science nor religion can afford.

Alfons Hugs, the project's initiator, writes in his text to the catalog that

[S]ince it is an art exhibition, the selection of the older works was primarily based on aesthetic and not on scientific criteria ... Instead of one-dimensional debates on poverty (or hunger, or violence, or political crises) or crass generalizations we are offered a glimpse of the artistic complexity and aesthetic richness of the tropics in a way that promises to change the terms of the North-South dialogue. This will free the South from the trap of always being seen in a bad light, while the North’s insistence on explaining the world in economic terms can be put into proportion, thus paving the way for a genuinely cosmopolitan and multi-perspective view of the world in the Humboldtian sense.

The show is structured around seven "mythically charged" themes meant to integrate the traditional and contemporary artworks: After the Flood, The Short Life, The Color of Birds, The Forbidden Laughter, The Broken Arrow, Tropical Baroque, and The Urban Drama.

The Tropics is accompanied by a comprehensive published catalog (available in German and in English -- click here for the English edition in WorldCat) in addition to the extensive web site.