Magazines - Tribal Art Autumn 2011

By Kevin D. Dumouchelle, assistant curator for the Arts of Africa and the Pacific Islands at the Brooklyn Museum.

Introduction
“Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi,” a well-known Asante proverb, holds, “One must turn to the past to move forward.” This spirit animates African Innovations, a reinstallation of the Brooklyn Museum’s African collection that opened August 12, 2011. Consisting of over 200 objects in a wide variety of media and genres, including a significant number of works not previously on view, the installation aims to build on Brooklyn’s storied history of collecting and exhibiting African art, while moving toward new methods of display and interpretation for the twenty-first century. Its signature work, a three-headed figure (sakimatwemtwe) by an unidentified Lega artist, is emblematic of this theme—with one large head rooted in its own nineteenth-century moment, its additional faces might be said to be looking both back toward the past and ahead to the future.
The first stage in an eventual larger presentation of the museum’s African holdings, African Innovations arranges the African galleries chronologically to emphasize for the first time the continent’s long history of creativity, adaptation, and artistic achievement. The installation explores how African art was conceived to solve important artistic, social, political, and cosmological problems, inviting the viewer to appreciate the works on view as creative solutions with a long history of formal and functional change.