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Exhibition Preview

The Essential Art of African TextilesDesign Without End

Alisa LaGamma To paint a picture of a real and present Africa in Dakar as in Bamako, Accra, or Lagos is to cap-ture their dynamic marketplaces ablaze with color. Across the continent, these living tableaus that are the epicenters of their communities are defined by a lyrical cacophony of designs and hues. The fabrics

of such immense collages of humanity constitute scores of acts of aesthetic self-determination predicated on the rich variety of ways in which cloth has been elaborated.

The very textiles that animate these human arenas are one of the major commodities exchanged. Their importance as an item of trade is as apparent now as it was when the earliest commercial networks joining North Africa with regions south of the Sahara were developed in the first centuries ce. Given their portabil-ity, textiles have been the ultimate vehicle through which human creative ingenuity has traveled long distances. Their dissemina-tion has provided a conduit for the transfer of ideas across cul-tures and has been the spark to renewed creativity.

Inherent to this medium is its capacity to seamlessly adapt to change and newly emerging social realities. Unlike so many sculp-tural forms of expression that have come to epitomize Africa’s artistic heritage in the West, textile traditions have not only per-sisted as a form of expression across the continent, they have pro-liferated. The constant renewal of regional textile genres attests to their continued relevance and fulfillment of ongoing cultural needs and desires. In their most exalted manifestations they have been conceived as immense architectural elements that enliven and define interior space or voluminous garments that envelop the body in layer upon layer of ostentatious folds. Whatever their intent, their design is fundamentally informed by the expansive template of strip-woven textiles whose composition of contigu-ous bands of design may repeat themselves or introduce variation. Beyond their graphic definition, a critical dimension of their aes-thetic impact is flowing movement. Never viewed as rigidly two-dimensional, they are responsive to wind and the human form. Despite the vitality and resilience of this idiom of expression that punctuates the experiences of every-day life as well as those of an exalted and extraordinary nature, African textiles have not received their full due in Western cultural institutions.

Conversely, many contemporary artists meaningfully engaged with this heritage have harnessed its visual language in their own creations in distinct media, presented here through sculpture,

Michael c. RockefelleR Wing

MetRopolitan MuseuM of aRt, neW YoRk

octobeR 1, 2008–MaRch 22, 2009

the exhibition is Made possible in paRt

bY the andReW W. Mellon foundation,

fRed and Rita RichMan, and the ceil &

Michael c. pulitzeR foundation, inc, and

Was oRganized bY the MetRopolitan

MuseuM of aRt, neW YoRk, in collaboRa-

tion With the bRitish MuseuM, london

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installation art, photography, prints, and video. In evoking this aesthetic and visual vocabulary, they have reflected on its essen-tial character as well as the underlying significance of this mate-rial. Their insightful quotations of textiles associated with Africa’s experience at once enhance our appreciation of their classical sources of inspiration and eloquently bridge the divide between “traditional” and “contemporary” expression. “The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End” is not a systematic sur-vey; instead, it has been conceived as a far-ranging conversation that seeks to bridge barriers created by the characterization of art appreciated by the Western avant-garde as “fine” and one that has profoundly informed expression in Africa as “applied.” The African canvases constructed, composed, and elaborated that are featured have been selected for their extraordinary artistic cali-ber and resonance at once formally and conceptually with works by the contemporary artists who reference them. At the same time these examples of “classical” genres that relate to ongoing textile traditions were selected for their early collection dates to underscore their longevity in relation to the highly personal idi-oms of the contemporary works. Many of these now preserved in the collection of the British Museum were originally collected during the nineteenth century as part of market research under-taken by European colonial powers eager to expand the demand for their own industrially manufactured cloth. Most importantly, however, they are original artistic explorations of sophisticated visual paradigms. The more we examine them the more it is indisputable that what may appear as dynamically improvisa-

tional and spontaneously exuberant expressions are inspired by carefully considered choreographed, disciplined, and controlled responses to precedents.

The history of textiles across the continent has been a vital and richly innovative one that has contributed to the development of a myriad of distinct genres of cloth and design which in turn have been springboards for other designs. The formidable litera-ture on African textiles, pioneered by Roy Sieber in a landmark 1972 Museum of Modern Art exhibition “African Textiles and Decorative Arts” and followed by the 1979 survey African Tex-tiles by John Picton and John Mack, provides a substantial foun-dation for an appreciation of the technical and regional practices that have informed these textile traditions. The examples of major textile genres cited by Picton and Mack in their seminal volume are drawn from the British Museum’s incomparable col-lection of African textiles, which is also the source of many of the works featured in this presentation. This exhibition of some fifty works includes an array of Africa’s key textile genres placed in dialogue with works by eight contemporary artists. Within the free-flowing structure of the installation, different media are examined against the backdrop of extraordinarily fine textile creations. Throughout those juxtapositions, the conceptual and technical processes drawn upon to imagine and execute each of these forms of expression is examined. The oeuvre of the con-temporary artists featured is considered from the vantage point of their relationship to cloth and their reflections on the signifi-cance of that medium.

1 Kente prestige clothGhana; Ewe peoples19th centuryCotton, silk; warp 188cm, weft 279cm (74" x 9' 2")Lent by The British Museum, London (Af1934,0307.165)Provenance: Collected in West Africa between 1880 and 1900 by Charles Beving Sr.

Richly elaborated and costly kente textiles, identified with wealth and status, are the ultimate attribute of prestige in both Ewe and Asante societies. These glorious fabrics were worn as voluminous toga-like garments draped majestically around the body to mark special occasions. During the eighteenth century Asante weavers radically expanded the palette drawn upon for such creations by unraveling silks imported along the coast for their richly hued threads. In order to execute such monumental works, the very long fabric woven on a double heddle horizontal treadle loom is cut at fixed intervals to produce a series of strips that are sewn together selvage to selvage. A man’s cloth typically requires twenty-four such strips. In this example, the strips come from seven loomed lengths, each with a dif-ferent warp arrangement. The resulting ver-tical stripes present rhythms of repetition that are not immediately discernable. To fur-ther vary the pattern, the colorfully striped asymmetrical strips are set in opposite directions so that they mirror each other.

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el anatsui (b. 1944, ghanaian)

The scope of meaning associated with cloth is so wide I have not heard it more aptly and succinctly put than by Sonya Clark … that cloth is to the African what monuments are to Westerners. Indeed their capacity and application to commemorate events, issues, per-sons, and objectives outside of themselves are so immense and fluid it even rubs off on other practices (2003).

The son and brother of men who wove Ewe kente cloth in Gha-na’s Volta region, Anatsui has used textiles as a leitmotif in his own sculptural oeuvre. As a student at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi (KNUST), Anatsui supple-mented his training in Western media with careful observation of the creative efforts of local artisans in regional idioms. Like humanists in the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries who carefully studied the visual language of Greek and Roman classi-cism and applied it to their own particular subject matter, Anatsui is a twenty-first century master intensely aware of Africa’s art his-torical traditions who infuses them with new life and meaning.

Over the course of a career that has spanned forty years, Anat-sui has been a pioneer in identifying and harvesting a variety of natural and man-made materials from his immediate environ-ment as media for radically new sculptural genres. His materi-als have included tropical hardwood, broken ceramic pots, grain mortars, evaporated milk tin lids, cassava graters, driftwood, and most recently discarded liquor-bottle caps. In the late 1990s, Anatsui developed a form of metal textiles or tapestries. Using the bottle caps discarded by Nigerian distilleries as an experi-mental material, he sorted them by color, flattened them, and stitched them together with copper wire. In doing so he found that he had arranged them in a manner reminiscent of the struc-ture of narrow-band textiles woven in West Africa. With this dazzling body of work he has developed a new and highly origi-nal form of artistry with formal and conceptual links to regional traditions. Since 1975 Anatsui has lectured at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he is Professor of Sculpture. An interna-tionally acclaimed artist, he was among Africa’s first contempo-rary artists to be featured at the Venice Biennale, in 1990.

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(opposite)2 El Anatsui (b.1944, Ghanaian)Between Earth and Heaven (2006)Aluminum, copper wire; 220.3cm x 325.1cm (86¾" x 128")The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Fred M. and Rita Richman, Noah-Sadie K. Wachtel Foundation Inc., David and Holly Ross, Doreen and Gilbert Bassin Family Foun-dation and William B. Goldstein Gifts, 2007 (2007.96)

In this work, the classic kente textile tradition produced by Asante and Ewe weavers has been subjected to a complete transforma-tion and yet is recognizable in vestigial form. Through the animated surface of a sculptural idiom Anatsui calls attention to the dynamism of Ghanaian textiles, whose shimmering lumi-nosity, dense composition, and immense rip-pling presence viscerally engage the viewer

(this page)3 Atta Kwami (b. 1956, Ghanaian)Juapong (2006)Relief print on paper; 35.6cm x 24.9cm (14" x 9¾")The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Janet Lee Kadesky Ruttenberg Fund, in honor of Colta Ives, 2008 (2008.293.1)

This print is one of series named after Ewe towns in Ghana’s Volta Region, where weav-ing is practiced and the artist was raised. The titles of the series—“Kpong,” “Kpetoe,” “Vane,” “Tsito,” and “Juapong”—were selected for their association with textile design as well as their sonorous musical quality.

atta kWaMi (b. 1956, ghanaian)

Over time, I have been better able to embody those aspects of my everyday life which have the greatest significance: kiosks, commercial (sign) painting, woven textiles, Ghanaian music (Koo Nimo) and jazz, all of which allow for serial composition in strips, stripes, grids. I have focused on color as my subject matter, perhaps taking me back to where I started with the perception of my mother’s paints and tex-tiles, but my art also resonates, I have seen, with the wider world of color formalist painters, such as Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko, Sean Scully, and Ellsworth Kelly (Kumasi, January 2008).

Atta Kwami draws inspiration from the sensory stimuli of his adopted urban environment of Kumasi, the cultural capital of the Asante region. His abstract imagery is a synthesis of ele-ments: pulsating musical rhythms, the city’s dynamic entrepre-neurial landscape, and the vibrant designs and intense colors of regional textile traditions. While he has regularly produced large-scale installation works, he imbues meaning into the small

visual detail as one might isolate a musical chord or interlude. Atta Kwami has combined his work as a fine artist with his

desire to chronicle Ghanaian art history. The subject of his soon to be published doctoral thesis is Kumasi Painting 1951–2007. His mother, Grace Salome Kwami, a gifted artist and educator, served as a critical formative influence. A sculptor, weaver, and painter, she submitted watercolors and gouaches to Ghanaian textile manufacturers in the 1960s. At the prestigious Achimota School, Atta Kwami studied weaving, among other art subjects, with an Ewe master. Kwami holds degrees in painting and art history from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, the Royal College of Art in London, and The Open University, Milton Keynes, in the UK, and a diploma from the Royal College of Art, London. For over twenty years he was senior lecturer of painting and printmaking at KNUST. His work is exhibited internationally and he has served as a major catalyst for bringing together Ghana’s fine arts community.

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4 Arkilla kereka interior hangingNiger, Tillaberi; Fulani peoplesFirst half of the 20th centuryWool, cotton, natural dye; warp 411.5cm, weft 127cm (13' 6" x 50")The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Labelle Prussin, 1997 (1997.446.1)Provenance: Purchased by Labelle Prussin from a Hausa trader in Accra, Ghana in 1971

Cloths of this grandeur served as tent dividers and marriage-bed hangings. Such creations were the most costly textiles produced in the Niger Bend region and were almost always woven on com-mission. Their aesthetic reflects the cosmopolitan engagement of weavers south of the Sahara with the formal vocabulary of North African textile traditions. Berber women weave wool textiles for clothing on a wide vertical loom thought to be of pre-Arabic origin, and the closely related geometric designs they produce occur in bands across the weft. In the Western Sudan, however, men weave wool textiles on double-heddle looms, and the long narrow fabric that is produced is cut into strips that are stitched together to form the completed cloth. In order to reproduce the effect of the North African cloths through this different technical process, the weaver had to calculate accurately the distance between motifs so that they would match up once the strips were aligned. With its designs exactly repeated and perfectly synchronized, the resulting cloth becomes a flawless continuum of dense pattern.

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seYdou keïta (1921(?)–2001, Malian)

… my first backdrop was my bedspread. After that, I changed the backdrop every two or three years: this is how I can now establish the dates of the negatives … Sometimes the backdrop went well with the clothes, particularly for the women (Bamako, August 1994).

The studio photographer Seydou Keïta was an eloquent chroni-cler of the aspirations of a new urban elite in Mali’s capital during the 1940s and ‘50s. During this period of immense economic and demographic growth, the population more than doubled. In this context, he was one of a number of self-taught individuals who launched businesses as commercial portrait photographers in Bamako. Beginning in 1948 his studio was situated at the heart of the city, not far from the train station, the large market (le Marché Rose), and the cinema (Soudan Ciné). The élan and aesthetic appeal of Keïta’s work reflects his gifts in choreographing a mise en scène that ideally captured his subjects’ individual character with elegance and composure. Keïta shot in black and white and devel-oped his own 13cm x 18cm negatives as prints of the same size.

Despite his restricted palette, textiles dominate as vibrant formal elements. These include the various fabric backdrops he selected as well as the personal sense of style evident in the fashions worn by the female sitters. In combination, these lively contrasting pat-terns create a distinctive and dynamic visual tension.

According to Keïta, the qualities evident in his work that attracted his clientele were his emphasis on capturing crisp detail, sharpness and clarity of line, and masterfully calibrated composition. These commissioned portraits, carefully calculated to reflect the cosmopolitanism of their subjects, were originally intended for intimate viewing in their subjects’ homes. Keïta closed his studio in the early 1960s when he was called upon to serve the newly independent Malian state as official government photographer. In the 1990s large-format prints were produced from the original negatives in Paris. The names of the individu-als immortalized in these images are for the most part lost, as Keïta’s archives of his negatives did not record the identities of the thousands of clients who passed through his studio.

5 Seydou Keïta (1921(?)–2001, Malian)Untitled portrait [Seated Woman with Chevron Print Dress] (1956, print 1997)Gelatin silver print; 60.96cm x 50.8cm (24" x 20")The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Joseph and Ceil Mazer Foundation Inc. Gift, 1997(1997.364)

The leaf-patterned cloth backdrop was used by Keïta for sittings throughout 1956. Its striking juxtaposi-tion with the sitter’s printed dress plays her aesthetic against the photographer’s pictorial conceit.

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6 Malick Sidibé (b. 1936, Malian)Untitled [Portrait of a Woman Standing Before a Striped Background] (1979)Gelatin silver print; 14cm x 8.9cm (5½" x 3½")The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Nancy Lane Gift, 2003(2003.160)

The formal tension that is the focus of this portrait is the layering of the striped cloth of the studio backdrop with those worn by the subjects. The design of the woman’s wax print that unfolds in vertical columns the length of her skirt echoes and contrasts with the controlled struc-ture of her environment.

Malick sidibé (b. 1936, Malian)

In the studio I liked working on composition. The photographer’s relationship with his subject happens through touch. Arranging the person, finding the right profile, the right lighting to highlight their features, bring out the beauty in their bodies … I’d find posi-tions and postures that suited each person, I had my own tactics (Bamako, 1998).

Malick Sidibé’s photography uniquely captured the youthful exuberance of post-Independence Malian society. At an early age his natural talent for drawing was identified, and his artis-tic education began in 1952 at the Maison des Artisans Souda-nais in Bamako. He subsequently transferred that sensibility for representing the world around him to developing a command of the photographic medium by observing the practice of the French studio photographer Gérard Guillot. Sidibé opened his own studio in the Bagadadji district of Bamako in 1962. His own photographic record is distinctive, however, for his movement

between portrait photography and event-driven coverage of the way the youth of Bamako spent their leisure time.

The appeal of this fresh and energetic subject matter led to his tireless pursuit of documenting social gatherings, ranging from the club scene animated by rock-and-roll and soul to excursions down the Niger. His images reflect the sheer joie de vivre and insouciance of their protagonists during this period of Africa’s transition to modernity in the 1960s and ‘70s. Whether he was in the studio or at a dance, his keen eye for spontaneity and for imaginative clothes and attitudes afford his imagery originality and a distinctive style. While his formative attachment was to black-and-white photography, in recent years he has worked in both black-and-white and color for the French fashion maga-zines Vogue, Elle, Cosmopolitan, and Double. Sidibé received the Hasselblad Award for Photography in 2003, the Venice Bien-nale’s Golden Lion for lifetime achievement award in 2007, and the ICP Infinity Award for lifetime achievement in 2008.

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7 Adinkra ceremonial wrapperGhana, Brong-Ahafo region, Mim village; Akan peoples, Asante groupFirst quarter of the 20th centuryCotton, indigo dye, wax; warp 232cm, weft 112cm (91½"x 44¼")Lent by The British Museum, London (Af1935,1005.2)Provenance: Purchased by A. F. Kerr in the village of Mim, Brong-Ahafo region, Ghana in March 1934. Presented by Kerr to the British Museum in 1935

In Akan society, adinkra cloth underscores the relationship between the living and ancestors, the present and the future, concerns of the moment and those of the hereafter. Worn wrapped around the body like a toga to mark various occasions ranging from funerals to festive occasions, their compositions are conceived of as visual texts. Once the founda-tional cloth has been selected, its surface is systemati-cally subdivided into a grid through the application of a dark pigment, prepared from tree bark and iron slag, with a comb-like instrument. Within each

square a single abstract or representational motif is rendered with a stamp. More than fifty-three of these named visual motifs, imbued with historical, cultural, and mystical significance, have been recorded. The author of a particular cloth selects which ones will be depicted and how they will be arranged across the pictorial field. This example features at least thirteen distinct signs ranging from a concentric circle, consid-ered to be of paramount importance among designs, to double ram’s horns associated with leadership, strength, and humility.

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8 Grace Ndiritu (b. 1976, British)The Nightingale (2003) Video; 7 minutes 01 secondCollection of the artist

In this work the manipulation of a textile affords the individual portrayed with a spectrum of possibilities that range from concealing her presence to actively transforming her identity. In an opening sequence the undulating, shifting, and rippling movements of the fabric cause it to appear to be an independently animate entity.

gRace ndiRitu (b. 1976, bRitish)

… seeing the Royal Academy exhibition “Matisse: The Fabric of Dreams His Art and His Textiles” reaffirmed the similarity of our working process … we share the ritual of assembling textiles and setting up the studio with fabrics as a background to galvanize our artistic practice. Matisse understands and appreciates the beauty and simplicity of working with textiles. The hallucinogenic proper-ties of overlapping patterns shift and swell in his paintings, override perspective and divorce shape from color. His paintings appear to expand the viewer’s eye and mind … By wrapping my body within textiles I extend Matisse’s methodology of transforming both the figure and patterns into a single pictorial plane. By loading pat-terns upon patterns … I also create and control tensions with the fabrics that provoke a transcendental experience (London, 2005).

Grace Ndiritu boldly relies on her own physical presence as the central agent of her evocative artistry. Her “handcrafted vid-eos” are highly personal and introspective solo performances in front of a camera fixed on a tripod. Although Ndiritu studied

textile art at the Winchester School of Art in the UK, she was never interested in designing fabrics. Instead she came to exploit textiles as a meaningful vehicle for creative expression following journeys of self-discovery extending from the Himalayas to Ice-land and from India to Mali. During those nomadic explorations she derived a basic level of personal security from a simple scarf that makes its appearance in her video The Nightingale.

Raised and based in Britain while of Kenyan heritage, Ndiritu’s experience has instilled in her a lack of affiliation with any one place and a belief in the importance of obtaining an awareness of as broad a spectrum of experiences as possible. Her experiences outside the West have led her to reflect on the way that art else-where is more seamlessly a part of every-day life, as in the way she found textiles to be integrated into Malian society. In draw-ing from that tradition, she has sought to manipulate textiles as vehicles for eliciting emotional responses and as objects of aes-thetic contemplation in concert with the body. Among Ndiritu’s international presentations of her work has been a solo exhibi-tion at the 2005 Venice Biennale.

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9 Sokari Douglas Camp, CBE (b. 1958, British)Nigerian Woman Shopping (1990)Steel; 180cm x 66cm x 83cm (71" x 26" x 32¾")Lent by Packman Lucus Collection, London

This faceless woman would be invisible were it not for the bold stars and crescents of the cloth wrapped around her. The design deliberately evokes a popular Dutch wax print whose star-and-crescent-moon pattern, produced in bold yellow and blue, derived from Arab sources and is now rendered for a West African clientele by the Dutch textile company Vlisco.

sokaRi douglas caMp, cbe (b. 1958, bRitish)

Kalabari culture revolves around cloth, especially for women. Our heirlooms are cloth. A key concern is how much important cloth you have to clothe the family for big occasions, funerals, births, marriages. We lay cloth out for wakes, covering rooms, beds, and even the deceased. When the body is buried a display of the cloth used for the wake is exhibited for a week with coral and jewelry. As a girl I graduated from beads to wearing a dress and subsequently additional cloths over time. The way the cloth is wrapped around one’s body and the height of it depended on one’s age and importance. So I was always very conscious of fabric. Some cloths (prints) can not be worn in some areas of my town during important occasions. As an artist I like figures that are clothed … The dif-ferent styles of clothing and textiles in Nigeria and Europe [as well as] the fabrics that cross cultures have been features in my work … The tactile qualities in fabrics and the way the material is worn is fasci-nating to me (London 2007).

Trained at the Royal College of Art and working in the UK, Sokari Douglas Camp is keenly engaged with the cultural life of the Kalabari people of Nige-ria, where she spent her early childhood. Douglas Camp has regularly revisited the scene of her forma-tive years and made it a major subject of her artistic explorations.

As a female artist who expresses herself in the physically demanding medium of welded metals, Douglas Camp occupies a unique place. Her expansive sculptural portrayals dis-till their subjects’ physicality to essential features. These hollowed representations omit certain aspects of the body and exactingly define others through cutting out two-dimensional designs from sheets of metal. Although Douglas Camp’s work is predominantly figurative in nature, it emphasizes the abstract forms of negative space so that blouses, textile wrappers, and tied headgear are ren-dered elegantly as openwork shells. In doing so she endows these solid armatures with a whimsical lightness and grace. She has also sought to infuse sculpture with a sense of vitality through evoking movement both by introducing kinetic features and underscoring the performative and active dimension of her subjects.

Douglas Camp moves easily between the Niger Delta and London so that her oeuvre visually summons individuals she has

observed in Buguma festivals or Brixton markets. Best known for her evocations of regional masquerade festivals, her work has responded to events that have unfolded in the Niger Delta that are of universal import. These have included the tragic execution of the author Ken Saro Wiwa, the ecological disasters that have resulted from oil exploitation in the Niger Delta, and the legacy of the slave trade. Many of the female subjects alluded to in her sculptures reflect the Kalabari aesthetic practice of widening the lower body through wrapping it in multiple layers of cloth. Both the considerable heft of a substantial corporeal being and the lav-ish use of costly textiles are favored for their identification with prosperity and abundance. Douglas Camp further insists on the inherent aesthetic qualities of textiles by highlighting their deco-rative patterns and suggesting their flowing movements in the most inflexible of media.

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Rachid koRaïchi (b. 1947, algeRian)

Blue, a supraterrestrial color, is the path of the infinite. It expresses detachment from the values of the world (Paris, 2008).

Born in Algeria, based in Paris, and traveling continually to Algeria, Tunisia, and Egypt, Rachid Koraïchi’s ambitious artistic endeavors are catalysts for journeys of discovery. These pilgrim-ages, punctuated by multimedia installations, retrace the paths taken by venerated Sufi mystics. Trained at Algeria’s École des Beaux-Arts, the Institut d’Urbanisme de l’Académie de Paris, and both the École des Beaux-Arts and École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, Koraïchi’s identity is centered on his heritage of Sufism, which informs his emphasis on the inseparability of aesthetics and metaphysics. The process of both developing these demand-ing meditations and experiencing them may be likened to the tariqa or way of Sufi mysticism through which one strives to perpetually deepen understanding in quest of grace.

Through making manifest the writings of exemplary mystics, Koraïchi seeks to capture an idea of transcendence. He never liter-ally transcribes sacred texts but rather expressively translates them into his own personal script, which combines the written word in Islamic calligraphy, characters that originate in pre-Islamic Ber-ber and Tuareg tradition, magical squares, and talismanic num-bers. Despite his focus on the power of esoteric signs, Koraïchi’s works are invariably multi-faceted, combining different kinds of media. These projects seek to highlight the cosmopolitan charac-ter of the Mediterranean world going back to the medieval period through reviving the legacy of specialized artisans. He executes these in collaboration with individuals trained in a region’s clas-sical traditions, such as weavers and dyers who produce elements of his monumental, often site-specific creations under his supervi-sion. Koraïchi’s expansive vision reignites complex intercultural networks, resides in major cultural institutions, and has been rec-ognized in international exhibitions including both the 47th and 49th Venice Biennales.

10 WrapperSenegalSecond half of the 19th centuryCotton, indigo dye; 152cm x 224cm (60" x L. 88¼")Lent by The British Museum, London (Af1934,0307.246)Provenance: Collected in West Africa between 1880–1900 by Charles Beving, Sr.

At first glance this cloth, composed of conjoined vertical units, appears to be an example of strip-weaving. This is, however, an illusion. Its author instead reproduced the look of that familiar structure by an entirely different creative pro-cess. The point of departure was an imported, commercially manufactured fine cotton plain weave. That cloth was torn into fifteen strips that were individually stitched with intricate patterns and immersed in indigo dye. Once the patterning of the individual units of fabric was complete the strips were stitched together into a single panel. In planning this composition and ingenious undertaking, the artist has quoted and transposed the widespread paradigm of strip constructed design as a purely aesthetic expression.

Yinka shonibaRe, Mbe (b. 1962, bRitish)

In 1990 I developed another way of questioning ideas about cul-tural authenticity. I started to use “African” fabric purchased from Brixton Market in my work. Batik, which is commonly known as “African” fabric, has its origins in Indonesia and is industrially produced in Holland and Manchester for export to Africa, where it is made into traditional dress. The adoption of the fabric, par-ticularly in West Africa, has led to the development of local indus-tries which also manufacture fabrics … In my own practice, I have used the fabrics as a metaphor for challenging various notions of authenticity both in art and identity (London, 1996).

Yinka Shonibare’s use of industrially manufactured “Dutch wax prints” in his work reflects on the most recent chapter of the history of trade between Africa and the West, the nature of that relationship, and assumptions about creativity and identity. Shonibare’s sharp insights into this history reflect his own per-sonal trajectory of being born in England to Nigerian parents, spending formative years of his youth in Lagos, and pursuing his vocation as an artist in Britain. With thoughtful ingenuity, visual poetry, satirical humor, and aesthetic panache his work subverts misconceptions about racial, class, and cultural identity and distinctions between high and low art. Trained as a painter and a graduate of Goldsmith’s College of the University of Lon-don, Shonibare has developed his ideas in a variety of media that include installation art, photography, and film. In each of these, he has drawn upon cloth as a prominent formal element that suggests to the viewer that things are not what they may appear to be at first glance. His use of this complex signifier has ranged from austerely stretching it as a canvas to lavish deployment in theatrical tableaux that foil established icons of Western culture.

In 2004 Shonibare was nominated for the Turner Prize and in 2005 was awarded the title Member of the British Empire in recognition of his service to the nation. Most recently his pro-posal for a public sculpture for the Fourth Plinth site in London’s Trafalgar Square was selected and in Fall 2008 his work was the focus of a mid-career retrospective organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia and traveling to the Brooklyn Museum, New York.

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spring 2009 african arts | 99

11 Yinka Shonibare, MBE (b. 1962, British)100 Years (2000)Emulsion, acrylic on Dutch wax printed cotton textile, painted wood; 248.9cm x 850.9 cm (98" x 335"); 100 panels each: 30cm x 30cm (11¾" x W. 11¾")Lent by Ninah and Michael Lynne, New York

This installation takes the form of a monumental sampler of one hundred panels of wax prints, stretched as canvases, that the artist purchased in Brix-ton, South London, and which Vlisco manufactured in Hel-mond, Holland, for “African” consumers. They all are altered by painterly interventions that obliterate their designs. The visual intensity of this dense tableau of contrasting patterns and their underlying conceptual order challenges the idea of the grid in Modernism and invites association with the expansive scope, dynamism, and structure of woven and patterned West African textiles.

12 Rachid Koraïchi (b. 1947, Algerian)7 Variations on Indigo (2002)Serigraphy on Aleppo silk, ink, and paint; each banner: 320cm x 48cm (126" x 18¾")Collection of the artist

In these elements from a larger installation, the artist fore-grounds indigo, the ubiquitous deep blue dye obtained from various plants that has been used in virtually every culture. He underscores its importance in trade networks between the northern and sub-Saharan regions of the continent and the world at large.

10A17_AMM401_p88-99.indd 99 11/21/2008 11:10:28 AM