Robert Goldwater Library blog

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

Photo: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

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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...]

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.

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

Unesco launches World Digital Library

This month Unesco launched World Digital Library (WDL), which makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.

The web site boasts that every UN member country is represented by content on WDL. Metadata is provided in seven languages. The WDL "focuses on significant primary materials, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other types of primary sources. One of the WDL's content objectives will be to work closely with UNESCO's Memory of the World program to make publicly accessible digital versions of these collections."

Browsing is available by place, time, topic, material type and contributing institution. Where appropriate links are provided to the url of the original resource.

The site is hosted by the Library of Congress. Content comes from the World Digital Library's partners, "mainly libraries, archives, or other institutions that have collections of cultural content that they contribute to the WDL." The idea of a digital library was first proposed by James Billington, then Librarian of Congress, in June 2005. Not surprisingly at this point the largest contribution (505 items) is from LC.

Addendum: BiblioOdyssey has a typically rich blog post illustrating the depth of visual treasures currently covered by WDL. Definitely worth a look.

Powerhouse Museum goes Creative Commons!

reblogged via Powerhouse Museum (Sydney) blog:

Powerhouse collection documentation goes Creative Commons
By Seb Chan , Apr 2, 2009

We’re happy to announce that as of today all our online collection documentation is available under a mix of Creative Commons licenses. We’ve been considering this for a long time but the most recent driver was the Wikipedia Backstage tour.

Collection records are now split into two main blocks of text.

The first section is the relatively museum-specific provenance which is now licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial license.

The second section is primarily factual object data and is licensed under a less restrictive Creative Commons Attribution, Share-Alike license.

Just to be very clear, images, except where we have released them to the Commons on Flickr, remain under license. There’s a lot more work to be done there.

So what does this really mean?

Teachers and educators can now do what they want or need to with our collection records and encourage their students to do the same without fear. Some probably did in any case but we know that a fair number asked permissions, others wrongly assumed the worst (that we’d make them fill out forms or pay up), and it is highly likely that schools were charged blanket license fees by collecting agencies at times.

Secondly it means that anyone, commercial or non-commercial can now copy, scrape or harvest our descriptive, temporal and geospatial data, and object dimensions for a wide range of new uses. This could be building a timeline, a map, or a visualisation of our collection mixed with other data. It could be an online publication, a printed text book, or it could be just to improve Wikipedia articles. It can also now be added to Freebase and other online datastores, and incorporated into data services for mobile devices and so much more.

Obviously, we’ll be working to improve programmatic access to this data along the lines of the Brooklyn Museum API, as well as through OAI and other means, but right now we’re permitting you to use your own nouse to get the data, legitimately and with our blessing - as long as you attribute us as the source, and share alike. We figure that a clear license is probably the ground level work that needs to preceded a future API in any case.

Thirdly, we’ve applied an attribution, non-commercial license to object provenance largely to allow broad educational and non-commercial repurposing but not to sanction commercial exploitation of what is usually quite specific material to our Museum (why we collected it etc).

You might be wondering why we didn’t go with a CC-Plus license?

A CC-Plus license was considered but given the specific nature of the content (text) we felt that this added a layer of unnecessary complexity. We may still, in the future, apply a CC- Plus license to images where it will make more sense given we have a commercial unit actively selling photographic reproductions and handling rights and permissions.

Yale Art Gallery adds Indo-Pacific art department

''The Yale University Art Gallery announced this week that it would add a curatorial department devoted to Indo-Pacific art. The initiative is the brainchild of Thomas Jaffe, a Yale alumnus and collector who is giving the university about 500 examples of Southeast Asian tribal sculpture from his collection. He also recently bought for Yale a collection of Indonesian textiles put together by two experts in the field, Jeff Holmgren and Anita Spertus. In addition Hunter and Valerie Thompson, collectors from Toronto, have donated their collection of Javanese gold jewelry and sculpture to the university ...

"The new Indo-Pacific department will mean the creation of a curatorial position. Ruth Barnes, textile curator in the department of Eastern Art at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, will join the faculty, first as a consultant in April and full time in 2010. And a new gallery devoted to Indo-Pacific art is scheduled to open around 2012, once the three buildings that house all of the Yale University Art Gallery are renovated ... ."

Reblogged from the New York Times Inside Art column, By CAROL VOGEL, Published: March 12, 2009

The Truth about the Lost Amazon Tribe "Hoax"

[Image source: AFP]

reblogged via Huff Post:

The Truth about the Lost Amazon Tribe "Hoax"

By David Grann, Author, staff writer at The New Yorker

Posted March 8, 2009 | 08:44 PM (EST)

Last year José Carlos Meirelles, who works for the Brazilian government agency set up to protect the country's indigenous populations, released photographs that captivated the public imagination. Taken from an airplane swooping over the Amazon jungle, the pictures showed a group of Indians--their faces streaked with war paint, their bows drawn with arrows--that were said to remain uncontacted by the outside world.

Meirelles said that he had released the photographs to protect the tribe's territory from the onslaught of prospectors and loggers and farmers. In pursuit of such bountiful land, settlers had denied there were any remaining uncontacted Indians, and had mounted a campaign to open these territories for commercial use.
A few days after the photographs were made public, reports in the media surfaced that seemed to confirm the settlers' contention: the images were labeled "fakes," and widely dismissed as part of a "hoax," a "fraud," and a "PR joke."

Yet this perception was deeply misleading, and has had severe repercussions for the Indians in the region. As I document in my new book "The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon," even today parts of the Amazon--a wilderness area virtually the size of the continental United States--remain unknown. The Brazilian government estimates that there are more than sixty tribes that are secluded in the jungle. John Hemming, the distinguished historian of Brazilian Indians, has said that these forests are almost "the only place on earth where indigenous people can survive in isolation from the rest of mankind."

The dispute over the photographs stemmed from confusion over the meaning of "uncontacted," as these groups are commonly designated. Though Meirelles had never said the tribe was unknown, many in the press had initially portrayed the group as such. In fact, like many of these tribes, the group's existence had had long been known about--its presence detected either by frontiersmen or by satellite imagery. Indeed, it is likely that many of these tribes have had some form of fleeting "contact" with outsiders over the years.

But that did not make the photographs "fakes" or a "hoax." The reason these tribes are classified as "uncontacted" is because they have retreated into the jungle and consciously avoided any interaction with settlers--an interaction that has frequently led to the extinction of Amazonian tribes.

In 2005, I visited the Kalapalo Indians in the southern basin of the Amazon. The tribe lived in the Xingu, which is part of Brazil's first Indian reservation. (It was created in 1961.) While the tribe had been contacted by the Brazilian government several decades earlier, its fate gives some sense of the threat to these indigenous communities.

While I was there, I spoke with a member of the tribe named Vanite, whose job was to guard one of the posts on the reservation. He told me that the other day an Indian had come to him and said, "Listen, Vanite. You must come with me down the river. The white people are building something in Afasukugu." The word "Afasukugu" meant "the place of the big cats"; at this site, the Kalapalos believe, the first humans were created. Vanite picked up a stick and drew a map on the mud floor. "Here is Afasukugu," he said. "It is by a waterfall."

Vanite paused for a moment, then continued with his story. "So I said, 'I will go with you to Afasukugu, but you are crazy. Nobody would build anything at the place of the jaguars.' But when I get there the waterfall is destroyed. They blew it up with thirty kilos of dynamite. The place was so beautiful, and now it is gone. And I ask a man working there, 'What are you doing?' He says, 'We are building a hydroelectric dam.' "

The dam was being built in the middle of a major river that ran through the Kalapalos' territory. Vanite, who was becoming more agitated, said, "A man from the [Brazilian] government comes to the Xingu and tells us, 'Do not worry. This dam will not hurt you.' And he offers each us of money. One of the chiefs from another tribe took the money, and the tribes are now fighting with each other. For me, the money means nothing. The river has been here for thousands of years. We don't live forever, but the river does. The god Taugi created the river. It gives us our food, our medicines. You see, we don't have a well. We drink water right from the river. How will we live without it?"

After Vanite finished his account, the chief of the Kalapalos, who was standing beside him, concluded, "If they succeed, the river will disappear and, with it, all our people."

Related News On Huffington Post:

HOAX: The Lost Amazonian Tribe That Wasn't They are the amazing pictures that were beamed around the globe: a handful of warriors from an 'undiscovered tribe' in the rainforest on the Brazilian-Peruvian...

East African commemorative banner

via Artnet magazine:

An East African banner commemorating Barack Obama’s election, with a text in Swahili reading "God has blessed us with peace and love.

Social Networking the Museum (part 2)

[For part 1 see: Up Close + Personal: Socially Networking the Museum, via newsgrist]

re-blogged via koven j. smith:

Twitter, Museums, and the “Institutional Voice”

December 30th, 2008 by Koven

Image via CrunchBase

Maria Gilbert of the Getty Museum started an interesting (and, I’m sure, evolving) conversation this morning about institutional “brands” on Twitter. The discussion was sparked, in part, by a recent post from Ari Herzog assessing the Museum of Modern Art’s own online presence. Twitter, and specifically how to use it in an institutional capacity, has of late been a hot topic at the Met as well, and the time seems right to lay out some of my own thoughts on the subject. Welcome to my New Year’s resolution to write more here at kovenjsmith dot com. Woot.

I think that the process of trying to figure out how to use so-called “social media” platforms like Twitter and Facebook has essentially accelerated the disintegration of what we used to call “the institutional voice”; that single, monolithic, thoroughly-vetted voice that spoke to you, the visitor, from a given museum’s publications, press releases, and Web site. As more and more low- or no-cost publishing platforms have become available over the last decade, we’ve seen an erosion of this single voice, as individuals from institutions are able to publish more quickly without going through a traditional vetting process. The question for museums is then: when that voice is gone, what replaces it?

I find, on Twitter, that institutional or company feeds are always less interesting than personal feeds. They’re informative, to be sure, and often highlight things about a given institution (a work of art, an upcoming program) that I might not have otherwise known, but they lack that certain personal angle that makes for a really good feed.

The problem is that a feed that speaks for an entire museum must, by its very nature, often remove the personal and/or provocative from its tweets in order to appeal to the broadest possible constituency. Therefore, the problem is less “what should we write about?” and more “from what perspective should we write?”

I agree with Tyler Green that the primary focus of a museum feed should be Art, but an institution can’t be as free with its opinions as an individual can be. If an art museum were to say something like “this portrait looks like Billy Dee Williams” in its Twitter feed (and let’s hope that happens), I’d have to wonder, as a follower, whose perspective that is. Does someone in the marketing department think that? Does the curator? An educator? The Web site director? As an institution, then, we’re reduced to posting somewhat bland tweets–daily highlights of works from the collection (something better suited to an “Artwork of the Day” desktop widget), or advertisements about half-price admission days (which probably belong in a marketing newsletter).

However, this problem of perspective goes away if you replace that single feed with a diversity of feeds from your staff.

Think about it. Friendships in the virtual space are not much different from friendships in real space. I’ll never be “friends” with MoMA, no matter how much I may love it as a museum, but I could easily imagine being friends with MoMA’s technology people, its curators, its educators, or its conservators. MoMA The Institution might not feel free to say that a particular work in its collection is sub-par, but a curator on MoMA’s staff might be willing to tweet at length about why that work is sub-par. I may not agree with that perspective, but it’s still an interesting one to read (and potentially joust with as well, via @ replies). As a follower, I’m not engaging with the institution per se, I’m engaging with one of many possible viewpoints from within that institution. This would have the end result of actually connecting me to the institution in a much more powerful (and one would hope, lasting) way.

This doesn’t mean that a single institutional feed has no value. In fact, as Tim O’Reilly points out in a recent post, he finds that his own Twitter feed often works as a kind of switchboard, connecting his followers to individual feeds within O’Reilly Media. One could certainly imagine an institutional feed taking this role, functioning almost as a party host introducing various guests to one another.

Although it seems likely that Twitter is about to break into the mainstream, we’re all still really trying to figure out how best to use it. It’s not a blog, it’s not e-mail, it’s not a Web site–it’s something entirely different that, I believe, has the potential to fundamentally change the way museums interact with their public. In “Remix,” Lawrence Lessig states that “…despite the rhetoric of the content industry, the most valuable contribution to our economy comes from connectivity, not content. Content is the ginger in gingerbread–important, no doubt, but nothing like the most valuable component in the mix…” It will be interesting to see if this will become true for museums as a result of engagement with platforms like Twitter.

h/t to Joy Garnett (from the Goldwater Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) for the Lessig quote.

Koven J. Smith is the Musical Director of cornfield dance, as well as a producer of interactive technologies at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and an adjunct professor of Information Technology for the Visual Arts at New York University. With a background in electroacoustic music, formal composition, and new media design, Koven's work explores the intersection of multiple art forms and technology.