Hamline celebrates 150th anniversary with splendid African sculpture and artifacts

Mary Abbe, Star Tribune

April 9, 2004 ART09

African culture seems awfully remote from Hamline University in St. Paul, where fresh-faced, mostly Midwestern students of Euro-American heritage stroll across spring-green lawns lined with daffodils.

Yet the centerpiece of the school's 150th-anniversary celebration is "Material Differences: Art and Identity in Africa," a handsome show of rare sculpture, dance masks, utensils and ceremonial artifacts spanning 600 years from myriad tribes across the African continent. When the show opened last week, Henry Louis Gates Jr., a Harvard University professor and a distinguished African-American scholar, gave the keynote address, launching a two-month festival of African art, music and dance.

None of this seems incongruous to Leonardo Lasansky, chair of Hamline's studio-arts and art-history department, and the impresario behind the pan-African festival. The exhibition and associated events tap into the university's history, reaffirm its roots and further its cultural-diversity goals, he said.

Hamline, founded in 1854, had the first natural-history museum outside Chicago, he added, and a centerpiece of the museum's collection was about 500 pieces of African furniture, utensils and ritual ornaments given in 1889 by a Hamline alumnus who had been a missionary in Africa.

The African art show includes a small, beautifully carved and polished wooden chair from the Dan people of Liberia, a choice remnant of that original bequest. African art is also a personal passion for Lasansky, who for 20 years has nurtured professional ties with the Museum for African Art in New York, where the show originated.

“This is an attempt on my part to help the college recall its origins," Lasansky said.

On loan from more than 35 museum and private collections, "Material Differences" includes some rare items. There are more than a dozen pocket-sized figures carved from ivory, a material cherished by many African peoples for its rarity and expressive potential. One tiny head with a soulful, concave face perches on a neck that morphs into an elephant's foot; others are detailed figures used as finials for ceremonial staffs.

Another rarity is a conical figure about 15 inches tall with a narrow torso and a hooded head reminiscent of a medieval European knight's helmet. Fashioned from a black stone, it is one of only two carved human figures ever found in Great Zimbabwe, an ancient city in southern Africa that flourished between 1000 and 1500. Little is known about who might have carved the figure, or when, but its minimalist shape speaks across the centuries.

A group of bronze plaques and portrait heads from Benin in southern Nigeria stunning. The kingdom of Benin and its capital, Benin City, awed European explorers from their first contact centuries ago. Ruled for more than 1,000 years by a dynasty of obas, or kings, Benin was razed in 1897 and its palace looted and burned by the British, who then sold its lavish bronze ornaments and used the money to pay the raiding soldiers. The bronzes on view, dating from the 1500s and 1600s, depict armored warriors with bristling helmets and chin-tall collars.

Gold ornaments were a specialty of the Ashanti people of Ghana, and the show has fabulous examples of their handiwork: fanciful golden lions, discs and ceremonial swords festooned with stylized fish. Other choice items include elaborate ceremonial axes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, effigies containing ancestral relics, and power figures -- carved wooden forms bristling with nails and iron blades or festooned with feathers, shells, beads and other ornaments. The largest of these power figures, about three feet tall, were village guardians and protectors among the Kongo people, who sealed oaths and promises by driving nails or blades into the figures.

Rather than focus in depth on the cultural objects of one or two tribal groups, this show features items from many cultures organized loosely into four categories: material shaped by carving including wood, stone and ivory; things formed by fire such as gold, ceramics, iron and bronze; items that gain power through accumulation such as shamans' baskets filled with amulets, skins, twigs and other accoutrements of magic. The fourth category is ephemeral culture, which includes performances, stories and objects meant to be transitory, such as dance masks. An excellent video documents acrobatic dances performed with one of the show's masks.

"The theme of the show is the different materials and why and how they are used," said Frank Herreman, an exhibition consultant based in Belgium who organized the show. Their diversity illustrates "Africa's rich cultural heritage and the incredible variations in how to express oneself in sculpture."

From an art-history point of view, African art was also key to the development of 20th-century art, particularly the flattened forms and expressive designs pioneered by Picasso, Brancusi, Matisse and other Europeans.

"What's so important about this is that the continent of Africa had so profound an effect on the age of modernity, on concepts of time and space, on the freedom of forms and the spirit behind them," Lasansky explained.