At LACMA, a don't-miss African art exhibition full of mystery and beauty
Exhibition by professor of World Arts and Cultures and LACMA consulting curator Polly Nooter Roberts
Polly Nooter Roberts is an art historian and professor in the department of world arts and cultures/dance who studies the philosophical underpinnings of African visual and performance-based arts, and the translation of cultural experience into museum exhibitions. From 1999 – 2008, she served as deputy director and chief curator at the Fowler Museum at UCLA and has been a Getty Fellow. She currently serves as consulting curator of African art at LACMA, where she has assisted the museum in launching a permanent new program and dedicated gallery for the arts of Africa.
Object for object, “The Inner Eye: Vision and Transcendence in African Arts” provides perhaps the most flat-out beautiful museum exhibition in Los Angeles so far this year.
A selection of about 100 sculptures, many of them extraordinary, dates from the 13th to the early 20th century in a variety of cultures in West, Central and East Africa. Polly Nooter Roberts, Los Angeles County Museum of Art consulting curator for African art, traces an ambiguous line running between the visible and the invisible, sight and insight as represented in figures, masks, initiation objects, royal emblems and reliquary guardians.
Frequently the eye becomes a kind of mysterious membrane between material and spiritual worlds.
Take a Liberian mask whose symmetrical face with protruding eyes and mouth is enlivened by dramatically asymmetrical décor. One eye is crossed out, canceling its outward view. A small length of twisted cord creates a puckish grin when attached over a row of jagged teeth. The mask gleefully seems to say, “I know something you don’t know.”
Esoteric knowledge is a prominent undercurrent throughout the show, nowhere more beautifully — or mysteriously — expressed than in a Lega mask from what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A white oval head with a broad, heart-shaped face above a narrow, lozenge mouth is either without eyes or, possibly, is all eyes. Blindness reverberates with all-seeing insight.— Christopher Knight, Jun. 24, 2017
Read the full article at the Los Angeles Times website.