Magazines - Tribal Art Autumn/Winter 2008

(Excerpts from the article by Alisa LaGamma)

This fall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is highlighting the centrality of textiles as a medium of expression in sub-Suharan Africa while also looking at their impact on contemporary artists. While Western connoisseurs have privileged sculpture as the most important form of Africa's cultural heritage, textiles have, in fact, been the focus of the continent's most widespread, sustained, and enduring creative efforts. The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End presents a selection of some of the finest and earliest-collected textiles from West Africa from the collections of the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Many of these examples of classical textile genres were acuired by textile manufacturers and colonial officials during the nineteenth century. They constitute evidence of the dazzling array of talent, ingenuity, and technical skill available to highly discerning regional cultures with established aesthetic preferences.
There is no more personal yet universal means of expression than that of textiles, which are used to cloak our physical being. It is well established that the great appetite for textiles in sub-Saharan Africa stimulated both production of locally fabricated varieties and commerce in other forms that were acquired through long-distance trade networks. In a sense, textiles are the ultimate medium for the circulation of visual culture. Over the centuries, the repertory of styles and genres favored in West Africa has continually expanded, reflecting a highly cosmopolitan attitude that embraces both the classical and the innovative. The exhibition at the Met considers a number of these extraordinary textiles, the creative processes used to produce them, and their underlying aesthetic principles. In doing so it also examines how qualities of this seminal visual vocabulary are present in the work of certain key contemporary artists conversant with the significance of these traditions. In fact, The Essential Art of African Textiles is structured as a visual conversation between historical textiles from AFrica and the work of eight contemporary artists. The juxtapositions are especially meaningful given the more recent artists' fluency with Africa's artistic traditions, which has allowed them to translate aspects of these forms, both formally and conceptually, into their own highly personalized idioms of expression that range from sculpture, painting, and installation art to photography, prints, and video.