Magazines - Tribal Art Autumn 2007

By Alisa LaGamma, curator of Eternal Ancestors: The Art of the Central African Reliquary. She is a curator in the Metropolitan Museum’s department of African, Oceanic and American art..

Introduction:
A sweeping array of what are arguably the finest creations by African sculptors is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City through March 2, 2008. Eternal Ancestors features some 150 works assembled from the preeminent repositories of African art in Europe and the United States, complemented by ones drawn from the Metropolitan’s own encyclopedic collection. The exhibition focuses on sculptural creations from the equatorial region, which extends from southern Cameroon through eastern Congo. These works were among the earliest African artifacts to arrive in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century and have long been celebrated for the considerable influence they exerted upon the imagination of the Western avant-garde. The installation illuminates the artistic virtuosity of these African masterpieces while seeking to redress a long-ignored awareness of their original spiritual role. To do so, the works are considered thematically as sculptural elements designed to amplify the power of reliquaries that were once the focal point of ancestral devotions. The full spectrum of the region’s distinctive sculptural genres in a rich array of media that were developed to link up with and celebrate ancestors has been brought together for this occasion. This assemblage offers a unique opportunity to arrive at penetrating insights into an overarching regional aesthetic that has been informed by shared conceptual and formal concerns never before examined. Doing so at an institution like the Metropolitan also afforded the possibility of considering parallels with other major artistic traditions in Europe and Asia, so that the significance of these remarkable sculptures may be better appreciated within a global context.