Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: Historical works of African sculpture have become increasingly entangled with the global Black Lives Matter movement. A popular sign that was carried by protestors in the United Kingdom after the police killing of the unarmed African American man George Floyd in May 2020 read: “Don't like looting? You will hate the British Museum.” Meanwhile, a statement from the British Museum deploring Floyd's death and expressing solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement sparked thousands of tweets accusing the institution of hypocrisy and insensitivity. In June 2020, Paris Black Lives Matter demonstrators tried to seize artifacts at the Musée du Quai Branly.The material lives of African sculptural objects are today intimately linked with Black diasporic experiences, and these connections are made explicit in the work of contemporary American artists Hugh Hayden (b. 1983) and Simone Leigh (b. 1967). Both Hayden and Leigh draw on African sculptural traditions, largely from West and Central Africa, and sometimes even incorporate the objects themselves in their own sculptures. Their work creates a parallel between the colonial pillaging and displacement of African sculpture to Europe and North America and the forced diaspora of slavery and its afterlives in the United States. In his practice, Hayden utilizes wood as his primary medium, playing with its multilayered histories—African sculpture offers one iteration of this material. His sculptures and installations reflect on the history of social politics in the United States and the contribution of enslaved Africans to American culture and cuisine. Alternatively, Leigh's practice, which spans sculpture, performance, film, and activist-based work, is concerned with the marginalization of Black women and their exclusion from the archive or history. She uses her work to reframe the experiences of Black women as central to society. Hayden and Leigh bring these respective concerns to bear on the histories of African sculpture.The adoption of African sculpture by Hayden and Leigh occurs against a background of twentieth-century engagements with these traditions by European and African American artists and theorists. The Paris avant-garde's “discovery” of African sculpture, known then as art nègre, or “Black art,” effected the constitution of Afro-American modernism. The African American philosopher and art critic Alain LeRoy Locke (1895–1954), an influential figure of the Harlem Renaissance who travelled frequently to Paris, encouraged African American artists to adopt African sculptural traditions as a way to “reconnect” with an ancestral Africa in the creation of a Black art. However, African sculpture signifies differently today than it did at this earlier moment in time. There has been a turn toward the material lives of these objects and the contexts of violence through which they were acquired by Western institutions. The global Black Lives Matter movement has renewed calls for restitution as a requirement for a postracist society. In this article, I argue that contemporary artists have picked up on current debates around African sculpture. Hayden and Leigh make use of these associations to convey experiences of the Middle Passage, slavery, and its afterlives in the United States, but also a past that cannot be reassembled due to these events. Rather than an atavistic return to origins, their work demonstrates the remapping of cultural production in the New World and, in the case of Leigh, these concerns are specifically addressed with regards to the labor of Black women.In the early twentieth century, “African art” was synonymous with sculpture. Objects of ritual and ceremonial purpose entered the European market with the onset of colonization, and their artistic forms were adopted by modernist painters. The category of “African sculpture” came to include a wide variety of objects, ranging from masks and reliquary figures to commemorative heads. With their elongated features and streamlined forms, these objects played a constitutive role in the making of modernism and its radical break with realism. They were subsequently championed by Alain LeRoy Locke, who urged an emergent generation of African American artists to draw on African sculpture in their practices. Locke started writing on African art in 1924 with the essay “A Note on African Art,” which was published in Opportunity magazine.This essay was revised and retitled “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts” and appeared the following year in Locke's The New Negro anthology. In the second essay, Locke argues that African sculpture should help stimulate the “lagging channels of sculpture, painting, and decorative arts” among African American artists and help grow “the natural ambition of Negro artists for a racial idiom in their art expression” (1925: 256, 262). Much has been said about Locke's belief in a “racial idiom” (Bearden 1946, 2003; Schapiro 1936; Porter 1943, 2003), but I want to think more about his notion of an “ancestral legacy.” Locke's project arguably aimed to invent a classical heritage, or a cultural past, based on photographic reproductions of African masks and statues from the Philadelphia-based Barnes Foundation collection that graced the pages of his essays.1 In the earlier essay, Locke states: “Nothing is more galvanizing than the sense of a cultural past… This at least the intelligent presentation of African art will supply us” (1924: 138). In the revised essay, he famously asserts: “The Negro is not a cultural foundling without his own inheritance” (1925: 256).The relationship between African American artists and African artistic traditions can be explicated through Locke's writings on race and culture. In his 1924 essay “The Concept of Race as Applied to Social Culture” (Locke 1989), Locke argues against genetic or biological notions of race, redefining it as a strictly social category. He views race, or what he terms “social race,” as historically determined, the result of “social heredity” (1989: 191), or inherited “cultural conditions,” “stressed values” (1989: 194), and a “tradition, as preferred traits” (1989: 195). As Locke states: “Instead therefore of regarding culture as expressive of race, race by this interpretation is regarded as itself a culture product” (1989: 193). In fact, Locke uses “social race” as a synonym for “nation,” since integral to modern nationalist projects is the identification of common circumstances, tradition, cultural traits, and values that constitute nationhood. He substituted the concept of “race” for “nation” as early as 1916, arguing that “what men mean by ‘race’ when they are proud of race, is not blood race, but that kind of national unity and national type which not to the race but to the Locke that his own is a type of based on a sense of unity with of his In “The Concept of Locke the “the of a (1989: 191), as has a of about national and racial that carried for Black culture as a Race was for of Black culture as more than a of practices. This Locke to African sculpture in the making of what he a art,” which the of a among Renaissance of African art a in Locke's even they about with an ancestral Their from the of African sculptural to of African art. In The figures with in a a from The and of the from the early but at from these modernist that “Black art with Black He therefore as has African sculpture with “Black in Paris, Hayden the of which with nègre, as in the of African art and in In his painting, Hayden African specifically a reliquary and a a a Western art The about the between African American artists and their the work a at Locke's and an or to Africa, an which African objects the on a that the with in the “The that an relationship with African objects is not in but is of an in Africans as and of to is the work of and who of themselves that African sculpture. In at in of his Negro a between African art and the African American in at the from an and her are African her as an to these The of African art in of these not as a sign of artistic but also a of diasporic was central to the Harlem Black has in to Harlem Renaissance engagements with African sculpture, was a return that Africa as an ancestral with the artifacts of classical African as their As “the of Africa through the of ritual objects a way of it was an Harlem Renaissance artists and to a that been by slavery and of an ancestral in the following The Black of the and of the of the Harlem a of this and artists a in their African ancestral As African in the and the global movement a sense of solidarity the African were by as World of Negro in in and in The African become a and a of for African American artists who on a to and their African In with this from the Harlem Renaissance has the use of African art by African American artists in the and and as a for the of the Middle and the of slavery with its histories and African sculpture a to or with an ancestral Africa, these objects today a sense of and around the of African sculptural objects and the through which they were acquired have to the in as calls for restitution have the colonial of and of artistic The and of these objects were through this violence and were about the objects from their of to their production and of these works of African sculpture are in and in the they are from their contexts of it is that Black the Harlem Renaissance as a of that in the racial for an Negro Harlem Renaissance artists largely in painting, the contemporary sculpture in this is with concerns around African sculpture as a in the as objects by African that were and subsequently as and in Europe and North in to sculpture with a African wood that he and to a Central Africa in a variety of forms, an is the for a are and by ritual who are by to and a toward a of against in and are through the of or which of and sometimes with that the of the the and the as a Hayden a of the to the of his wood an the He the of the sculpture to the material and it on a This to the in and, by the violence and displacement to the of African sculpture. of and for wood is of African is he is is is it a is it Hayden the of the wood as of concerns around the and a displacement from its to the by African is is is is it a is it has played an role in the and cultural to the of around African art. As it is to who has in to and African art. has to the twentieth century, African artifacts were not in African or Western In Western these objects a of from in of to in the natural history of the their “discovery” by modernist in the early twentieth century, they were to art and entered and they were as With this the of African art to and has largely been by the concept of as by is based on a of Western about African as and This of a that art” has between art” and or as as the category of the by The category of art” art made to be to a and it is by Western as the of Hayden the of African objects to Black diasporic experiences in the United States. the of the work, the of an Black from the American to New Harlem in the and He a to from a of men in his after in a with Black to the of the In New he is of and a in a to that his are as a on these experiences, in the of the an man I a man of of and and I even be said to a I to the of the African American the to the of the This of is in the of sculpture, can themselves in its As when they or of their and which is in the creation of around African art. Both through the is a to be made with the history of modernism. In the of a African as a to from the of a on his way to was at and the sculpture. on this the of a of that for In to the with African which the by a and This offers early modernist engagements with African for the a of is a in in on is to be said about his of The purpose of the is to be and can this to the which as a for Western and around in the art market today as by it has become increasingly common to African by the of Western and who of their are who in the known as the the and the As has these objects as a in the Western art market an of This of in is played on the of sculpture. on an to in Black “A of a of is a type of and violence that “the of their with which they through their Much like African sculpture, the Black man as a for a of or that from states: You with the to that in the This of offers parallel with African and have to or even its role in the history of modernism. on “The that in the when he the he the art of Black the in a Negro in In the of the of a of African art on and The was one of that Negro the their own of the work of art as with the in at in adoption of African art to be by African and modernist works were to from cultural of The was on the natural between modern art and than a artistic with In the case of and modernist of African sculpture were as through as and This of African sculpture from the history of modernism is in who is on the of to on the connections between African sculpture and Black diasporic experiences in the United States, I want to turn to sculpture, which Hayden at the as In West African Hayden with of with a with The work the known of the which was by to slavery in the In the are by with between The enslaved and the by for a of that in the sometimes carried as as enslaved In the of the the sculptures the of who the Middle and the of slavery and its Hayden African sculptural objects and their associations of and displacement as of the Middle has famously the Middle as a multilayered the signifies a as it is with as as of His of the is of in which African sculptures are in a As “the of this a from which but the of the is a of and one that and and African American in the New has the Middle as a of for the African this of a of as as of and that to the of the enslaved As the of is a African wood is and the these by the it one more from its earlier In Hayden creates a parallel between the of African artifacts as a result of the way they were as in or through the of or and the of connections and that through and the of the Middle and slavery the of return to an ancestral As the is a in as it occurs after these events. is a has to an or to with a or argues that this is an of the as the is that which is This the of However, the of return for the sculptures in the The of the work, as Western toward In a movement up by and Europe with his to African in to A year said that his to the of In the for the of artifacts in that were in that are or today from their In the to return objects in the national to have been from In the United the for and is up by for on and African sculpture, the Middle Passage, slavery, and Black diasporic experiences in the United States. In In the the way Black lives are up and by “the afterlives of a from who “Black lives are and by a racial and a that were Black up of the in which the of the the the as he “the is a and it the of is linked to on the violence by Black around the that the of Black or women who is kind of Middle that Black toward Their to and and are the afterlives of slavery, or what also calls “the afterlives of This is in terms of work, which African sculpture, as in objects by and as to the Middle Passage, which African as and is of sculptures by (b. that the of In the of police of unarmed African of the as kind of Middle the African sculptures from and objects, like the in and are of origins, the of that through the the sculptures in which their the of as wood and then with He subsequently the figures in a material which statues to and events. of sculptures to a African American man who was by a police a in and with a in a on a the are at its in of its The and is of a reliquary sculpture, but it has been by the figure is of its and one of its sculptures in the as a more In a is from the of a sculpture, for in is a of for who have as as lives are a police African sculpture is of the Middle Passage, Hayden and also these objects to its afterlives of in the United of an of work, Hayden African masks cultural and a at Museum in 2020, Hayden with the collection of African masks to of these sculptures. In Hayden an the of a The has a a and a In Hayden a with a of by the in to the of a Alternatively, in he a with a and a with of the masks by in the the of a wide Hayden with to and the of the masks and to subsequently their were then with the through a by as the material. Hayden this of as a way to “the of the their colonial and the of in the He the to the the in which the is painting, or on the from The sculptures as a they in for an of Africa that cannot be but the from which to to the of after the the Middle is by the a of and The to what and of which are of a to a culture In this has that the of racial and by Black the is the of a what has been as He that a of of from this known as the Black up a of cultural and of of that in and and in contexts as “the Alternatively, argues against or a more with the African She that should the of African or these in to the of history by the Middle Passage, the of and and the of and and they are in to these of Africa therefore a to a in that what is is is a of at the of The of the past is in terms of and Rather than the of the concept of “the of and which make a of history an of to with its in As have Hayden of the in with the of a for is of the concept of the by who the in with “Black to through and through the of what Africa for African and cultural played a role in the and of argues that the a ceremonial with its in West Africa, was a of Africans in American from which work and by the and The was of to as it an of West African of and the of African Floyd However, following these not but an identification with Africa by way of the of an identification that is after the of the Middle is of concept of the who this type of in the were enslaved Africans and their and they an early of the that Hayden with for the were the sculptures themselves to the of As by as and came to include of the and in African cuisine. were by in the early century, were as who without for a of their the century, enslaved from Central and West Africa, were in the of and were in of their They a of and American that are today the of an of a West African and a of However, enslaved have largely been from and they have their to American There is a to this and the of more as was by Black and these women in popular through the of who is based on the figure of the a of a that was African American This was to a of Black women slavery or a role of this in The African American from the of slavery up the of the twentieth century, women of African who to She the and of these women who were at their cultural traditions from one generation to not addressed by his sculptures the labor of Black women in the of cultural as in the of from one culture to and a in by Simone work the from the forced diaspora and displacement of slavery to Black In a for the of the Museum at Leigh of a type West Africa and by the as a modern have one of the of in the and the of has to ritual for the death of one or and for the of who as the figures that the are central to these and the the material forms of this In the are in of and They from the around a of in by the were for thousands of as in West in the the were by from the to in the West African for to the New World and This has been by as a were also the for a known as that the and to Afro-American In Leigh's the that the as they up on the their a from which they the but The the and the traditions that were to the African themselves in the New a past that is of that cannot be reassembled in its after the Middle of based on the modern Leigh's was after have one at and the a and one is at a time. a between the of Leigh like the in the also as a for and to the were made by Black in the early as a of the of that African American women as they for the and their own at This labor by Black women has been by as the in which “the from her to the is at the of her is the and the The of by has been in the figure of the own are as and to Black as the were the of these Leigh's that of the can be in the one is of Leigh is in specifically with regards to the material forms that from African in the New work has these through the of the Black as one of which is to early African American traditions In with Leigh a with a and but without or on a with a A from the of its and a at the the a The is with of and by enslaved the of in the in the American were on In the of The and of the United States, his with and who that in enslaved made in on the in the of a to African also that were regarded by the in as African enslaved in at this were or generation African making the with Africa a However, in the a on the of more than enslaved of were from of of these were to the of and were even to work in the have that were the of between enslaved African American and the and the objects material and to the Central African of that was with an belief in which enslaved with by with a of and and and has the on Leigh's with as for the of and as as the that Black women have carried with and in to and to cultural traditions and on Leigh have the to the Black in culture as a of of and This to earlier of and of the with a of that Leigh's sculptural figures to return the to be in up an I argue that Leigh's which draw from African sculptural traditions, are of an of Black labor in the of the after the Middle the relationship between and has linked Leigh's sculptures to the and with and the violence of in the of the African has that as a who her the Middle and of the death to the of the of like the of the in which I of the enslaved women who on African in the making of and the Black who Leigh, a of the these women the of one by “the of a by a that a for a that or that in the one work, in Leigh a on a of commemorative from the Kingdom of In to the which are with an and the of is like a by This of or is of the sculptures by Hayden and the and connections through In the Kingdom of commemorative were on in the from the to the as in the or The of a was to a to his and these commemorative heads. The the to be the of a and its cultural the commemorative is today a of a colonial the British of in which a British and have that the British on the Kingdom was a to the of a that but men has that it was in in the of colonial violence today the commemorative were to as for the and they are today in and the British In her to this sculptural tradition, Leigh a material of as as an history of and In the of the as a kind of of the Middle Passage, but it also the through its Leigh's sculpture the labor of Black women who the after the and who to with its in
Source: African Arts
DOI: 10.1162/afar_a_00670
Author: Gabriella Nugent
Language: English
Topic: Art, Politics, and Modernism
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6940787305