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...]

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. 

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

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.

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.

The Passing of Cecil Skotnes

Cecil Skotnes at home

via ArtThrob, 4-22-09:

The Passing of Cecil Skotnes

It was with sadness, that ArtThrob learned last Saturday morning that Cecil Skotnes had died during the night. The celebrated South African artist died in a Cape Town hospital after suffering a fall and contracting pneumonia. He was 82 years old.

Of Norwegian-Canadian descent, Cecil Skotnes was born in 1926 in a poor neighbourhood of East London. He fought in World War II against Italy with South African troops, after which he stayed on to study painting in Florence. On returning to South Africa, Skotnes studied art at the University of the Witwatersrand from 1947 to 1950. He lived in Johannesburg from 1946, relocating to Cape Town in 1978.

A champion of modernism in Africa, Skotnes started his career as a painter. But, influenced by German Expressionism, he turned to printmaking in 1954 when he met Egon Guenther, a goldsmith, art collector and collaborative printmaker who persuaded him to abandon painting and develop a new artistic language through printmaking.

From 1954, when he took up this new medium, many of Skotnes's woodcuts were printed by Guenther. Skotnes has since been recognised as a pioneer of printmaking in South Africa, as very few artists were working in this medium in the 1950s. He is also acknowledged for popularising printmaking in South Africa while teaching at the Polly Street Art Centre from 1952 to 1965.

Icon for my dead Uncle II 1998. painted wood. 122 x 122 cm

In 1952 Cecil Skotnes was appointed Cultural Recreation Officer at the Johannesburg City Council's Polly Street premises, where adult education for black people was offered. Skotnes began teaching informal art classes there, and a group of students quickly established themselves at the Centre as dedicated career artists.

By the mid-1950s, as many as eighty students attended the Polly Street Art Centre, as the school became known. It was here that Durant Sihlali (1935-2004) and other strong painters established a 'township art' genre. Sculptures were produced by talents such as Sydney Kumalo (1935-88), who was Skotnes's assistant from 1958. In the early 1960's the locus of this training moved to Eloff Street and the centre became known as the Jubilee Social Centre.

With increasing restrictions on the freedom of black artists under apartheid, Skotnes moved the studio equipment to Soweto, then resigned in 1966, following Kumalo's resignation about a year earlier.

In 1963 Skotnes helped to establish the Amadlozi group. This group, which included Guiseppe Cattaneo, Cecily Sash, Sydney Kumalo and Edoardo Villa, sought to work at the intersection of African and European art. Skotnes exhibited his prints on his first solo show at the Pretoria Art Centre in 1957, and some were chosen to represent South Africa at the São Paolo and Venice Biennales of 1957 and 1958.

In 2006 Skotnes said of his own work, 'My work is grounded in the African idiom. There are two elements here: understanding the art of Southern Africa before the white man put his foot in the country, and my experience of teaching township people." A former President of the now defunct South African Council of Artists, Skotnes was the recipient of many awards in recognition of his contribution to cultural development in South Africa: the Chamber of Mines Gold Medal in 1965, and the South African Breweries Gold Medal in 1968. He was awarded honorary doctorates from the Universities of Rhodes and Witwatersrand, and the Order of Ikhamanga in Gold (2003), for 'exceptional achievement in, and the deracialisation of, the arts, and for outstanding contribution to the development of black artists.' 

360-degree digital imagery and online exhibition sites

In conjunction with the exhibition Between the Beads: Reading African Beadwork, on view through Summer 2009, the Harn Museum of the University of Florida developed a complementary online exhibition that features rotating 360 degree views of thirty-two of the objects in the exhibition.

As the UF Library's Arts of Africa page explains,

In selecting items for the Between the Beads exhibit of African Beadwork in 2008, the Harn Museum partnered with the University of Florida Digital Library Center. The Digital Library Center provided imaging support by photographing each object in high resolution and creating a digital package which would simulate museum viewing by allowing each object to be seen in the round (360 degrees). Each object can also be enlarged to show detail giving scholars, researchers and the public an experience not available in the museum setting; the ability to inspect even the smallest stitch or tiniest bead. These images are now freely available online to anyone with an Internet connection within this collection.

Beaded Coronet (orikogbofo), Yoruba People (2002.39) (Click on the link to watch the object rotate)

Objects presented in the exhibition are drawn from the Harn Museum‘s collection and private collections. Interpretive text for the exhibition, available throughout the gallery, was supplied in part by the students in Dr. Victoria Rovine’s Spring 2007 Clothing and Textiles in Africa class.

African art suits the Times to a 'T'

African artists have made quite the splash lately in the New York Times' stylish fashion and design supplement, T Magazine. Recent issues, blogged in this space, featured Samuel Fosso in Men's Fashions and fashion photography by Malick Sidibé.

The most recent issue, Design Spring 2009, includes a piece written by Susan Morgan on Ethiopian multi-media artist Elias Sime. He has exhibited recently in 'Flow' curated by Christine Kim at the Studio Museum of Harlem. Three stitched canvases by Sime are on display at the entrance to the Michael Rockefeller Wing. (To read about them, Download Annexlabels)

'Elias Sime: Eye of the Needle, Eye of the Heart,' curated by Peter Sellars and Meskerem Assegued at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in Los Angeles, closed this last weekend. (Read Peter Clothier's review in the Huffington Post.)

And Sime was also responsible for the set design of 'Oedipus Rex' staged Peter Sellars and performed this month by the L.A. Philharmonic under Essa-Pekka Salonen. (Read the LA Times review here.)

According to last Sunday's piece, Sime has spent more than ten years assembling a home in Addis Ababa from traditional materials -- unbaked earth, thatched straw and green timber poles -- styled after round shelters known as tukuls, to which he has added his own signature assemblage. Unfortunately, the Times has not put the article, itself fashioned after the exhibition in Santa Monica, on its web site. (For those with paper copies of the Sunday Times, it appears on page 68.)

However a video link in a Christian Science Monitor review includes footage of Sime working on his building.

At right: 'Jemot,' (2003), wood, skull, horns, leather, and cowry shells. Courtesy of Bruce Morr/Santa Monica Museum of Art (photo source)

Malick Sidibé: Prints and the Revolution

 

Aichata Sylla wears an Oscar de la Renta navy-and-white polka-dot blouse. Miu Miu black-and-white skirt. Marc Jacobs sash. Belt from New York Vintage. Miu Miu bag. Cole Haan shoes. Philip Treacy hat. Louis Vuitton earrings. Photo: Malick Sidibé for The New York Times

For the fashion pages of last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, the newspaper commissioned the renowned Malian photographer Malick Sidibé. In response the photographer invokes his trademark black-and-white studio photography style featuring bold geometric backgrounds and local subjects, here in the service of haute couture and prêt-a-porter. In a departure from the customary blurbs, the Times was obliged to note not only the clothes' designer but the colors as well.

View slideshow

READ MORE: Click for works on Sidibé in WATSONLINE / WorldCat