Magazines - Tribal Art Summer 2011

By Constantine Petridis, Associate Curator for African Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Introduction
“Only by creatively imagining nomadic life in a pastoral culture can we begin to understand that prized objects were not a massive bronze at a portal or a cumbersome oil painting to beautify a hall, but modest, symbolic, and useful objects that could be carried on the person. . . . The change in status of these objects from curiosity to commodity to work of art has required an evolution of perception as aesthetic parameters have migrated through the radical shifts of art in the twentieth century. The migration of these objects has not altered them in any way, but the manner in which they have been received has been radically altered.” This excerpt from Karel Nel’s catalog essay for the Cleveland Museum of Art’s current exhibition, The Art of Daily Life, concisely encapsulates the major theme of the show. The Cleveland exhibition, which opened to the public on April 16, 2011, and will remain on view until February 26, 2012, comprises a selection of seventy objects that were created by highly talented artists from different cultures whose descendants inhabit present-day South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Botswana. The art produced in southeastern Africa was related to the privacy of the home or the intimacy of the person. The materials and size of the works in the exhibition reflect the migrant culture of the cattle herders who made and used them in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.