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Fowler Museum at UCLA to present
Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas
April 6–August 10, 2008
Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas
Fowler Museum at
UCLA
Box 951549
Los Angeles CA 90095-1549
Phone: 310/825-4361
Fax: 310/206-7007
The UCLA exhibition looks at gods and goddesses, sprites and spirits that
humans have worshiped as protectors and givers of life-giving liquid.
By Anne-Marie O'Connor, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
April 20, 2008
Mami Wata (circa 1987) by
Zoumana Sane
WATER, as a life-sustaining force and a mighty destroyer, has fascinated
humans since the beginning of time, as they migrated through fertile river
valleys, settling near rivers and oceans.
Rock paintings made in Africa nearly 28,000 years ago illustrate the reverence
for water spirits. Europeans too celebrated the power of sea gods like the
Romans' Neptune (known to the Greeks as Poseidon). They were beguiled by
female sirens, imagined water sprites in woodland ponds, and believed in
selkies: seals that rise from the waves transformed into beautiful naked
humans.
Today, a powerful female water deity remains a vital tradition in Africa and
countries of the African diaspora. The many faces of this "Mother
Water" will be revealed at the UCLA Fowler
Museum in an ambitious exhibition that follows the spirit from Africa to
the Caribbean and Brazil in paintings, masks, sculpture and altars. The
exhibition, "Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its
Diasporas," gets its title from the African name for a water deity often
depicted as a mermaid with a mane of long hair and a serpent around her neck.
"The myths of mermaids and their human attributes seem to be almost
universal," said guest curator Henry John Drewal. "I think it is
because the ocean and its kingdom is beyond our direct experience. We try to
create images that transcend the boundaries.
"I think there's this fascination with this notion of transformations
that we think ought to be possible. The transformation of humans into
forms," said Drewal, who is also the Evjue-Bascom professor of Art
History and Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Drewal first heard of Mami Wata in 1965 when he was a teacher in Nigeria. He
began his research a decade later, when a border dispute between Nigeria and
Benin left him stranded in Togo. "In Togo, she was all around me. It
seemed to me that she was calling me to pay attention to her," he said.
"I started seeing paintings and murals in her honor and started attending
ceremonies in her honor. I said, 'There's a message here.' She kind of seduced
me."
He studied the deity among the Igbo in Nigeria three years later, and went on
to study the Brazilian sea goddesses Yemanja and Oshun in Brazil in the 1980s.
Like the early Greek and Roman gods, African deities like Mami Wata possess
human weaknesses and foibles, and are imbued with such qualities as jealousy
and sexual desire along with their transcendent divine powers. "Some
people have this notion that gods and goddesses are backward, but I think they
are a recognition of our link to the supernatural and to human and spiritual
complexity," he said. "Other religions simplify those matters, like
the duality of good and evil."
Drewal believes the goddess is a hybrid spirit, born from the meeting of
European and African cultures.
A well-traveled spirit
RELIGIOUS figures have always been the subjects of art, from the early Venus
fertility figures to the elaborate Byzantine saints and the depictions of the
Virgin Mary.
The art history of the Mother Water images is fairly recent, according to the
show. Africa had many water spirits and gods when European slavers and traders
began to arrive on African shores in ships protected by the bare-breasted
wooden mermaids on their prows.
One of the first known mermaids to appear in African art was carved onto a
delicate ivory saltcellar created in the late 15th century by an artisan of
the Sapi peoples on Sherbro Island. The ornate figurine shows a mermaid, naked
from the waist up, swimming with crocodiles in waters at the foot of a ring of
tribesmen, as a crocodile climbs a cross above her.
Mother Water quickly traveled up rivers and along seacoasts in Africa. Some
trace her name back to Egyptian words for "divinity" and
"water," but Drewal believes Mami Wata is a pidgin English variant
of her name. Like pidgin and Creole languages, Mami Wata spread with commerce.
She became associated with trade with the outside world, and the mixed
blessings it conferred -- paving the way for her to become an early "
'capitalist' deity par excellence," Drewal said.
When European slavers kidnapped Africans and shipped them through the middle
passage, Africans took the water goddess with them. In Haiti, she was reborn
as La Sirene, a link to the slaves' African homeland, the Edenic utopia of
Guinee, as well as to the afterlife. In her seminal work on Haitian voodoo,
"Divine Horsemen," Maya Deren describes La Sirene as a sea
"goddess of love," a seductive siren who lives up to her name.
In Brazil she became Yemanja, the Queen of the Sea, whose feast day, Feb. 2,
still draws crowds of Brazilians who seek the love and protection of this
"Mother of Fish."
"She became this deity that comes from across the sea" from Africa,
Drewal said. "She personifies the meeting of people from the different
cultural worlds. Yet those cultural worlds share a belief in water
spirits."
Along the way, Mother Water has become a lightning rod for cultural
ambivalence over women's changing role.
In recent times, evangelical Christian sects in Ghana, and to a lesser extent,
Muslim fundamentalists, have attempted to demonize Mother Water as a satanic
force, a loose woman who will lead her followers down a lurid path to ruin. In
this view, she is a metaphor for the seductive allure of urban life -- with
all of its modern pitfalls.
To Drewal, her detractors, regardless of their denomination, represent
patriarchal resistance to a powerful woman.
But her followers are fighting back in this culture war. Like the
Pentecostalists, her Nigerian adherents have produced songs, CDs, even a
television talk show, in support of their deity.
"There's a religious negotiation going on," Drewal said. "Mami
Wata followers are proselytizing too. I wouldn't count her out."
anne-marie.oconnor@latimes.com
Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its
Diasporas
Fowler April 6–August 10, 2008
Beautiful and seductive, protective yet dangerous, the water spirit Mami Wata
(Mother Water) is celebrated throughout much of Africa and the African Atlantic
world. Often portrayed as a mermaid, a snake charmer, or a combination of both,
she and a “school” of related African water spirits all honor the essential,
sacred nature of water. Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its
Diasporas—a traveling exhibition debuting at the Fowler Museum at UCLA on
Apr. 6, 2008—explores five hundred years of visual cultures and histories of
Mami Wata through a dynamic presentation of the wide array of arts surrounding
her—sculpture, paintings, masks, altars, and more from west and central
Africa, the Caribbean, Brazil, and the United States. The exhibition will be on
display through August 10, 2008.
“Mami Wata has been the object of my affection (and study) for more than
thirty years. I guess I took to heart the words in a famous song by the Nigerian
musician Sir Victor Uwaifo: ‘If you see Mami Wata oh, never you run
away!’” says guest curator Henry John Drewal, Evjue-Bascom professor of Art
History and Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and
adjunct curator of African Art at the Chazen Museum of Art, UW-Madison.
Sources and Currents: Who is Mami Wata?
The exhibition opens with a large video projection by artists David and Hi-jin
Hodge called Watertime, to bring the ocean—so sacred to Mami Wata—into the
gallery. Against this backdrop a selections of key object provide an overview of
movements, images, and ideas that have played major roles in the arts for Mami
Wata. These include African images celebrating ancient and indigenous water
spirits, as well as global examples that demonstrate the transcultural nature of
Mami Wata.
Near the start of the exhibition several masks from Nigeria, Sierra Leone,
Guinea Bissau and elsewhere—featuring elaborate carvings of mermaids, snakes,
and marine life—attest to the pervasiveness of water spirit imagery in Africa.
Although the wellsprings of Mami Wata’s visual culture and history remain
conjectural, evidence indicates that the concept of Mami Wata has its source in
the first momentous Euro-African encounters in the fifteenth century. As such, a
fifteenth-century bronze medallion bearing a double-tailed mermaid appears here.
Created by an African carver, it was commissioned by a visiting Portuguese
client who supplied the European mermaid image. Mermaids may have also been
introduced in the form of figureheads on European ships, such as the beautiful
gilded example displayed in this section.
Like the mermaid, images of snake charmers also merged with African water
spirits. Not long after its publication in Hamburg, Germany, circa 1887, a
chromolithographic poster of the Samoan snake charmer Maladamatjaute reached
West Africa, likely via African sailors or European merchants. A later edition
of this iconic image is displayed in this section. In Africa, the poster had a
dramatic and almost immediate impact. By 1901, the snake charmer had already
been interpreted as an African water spirit, translated into a three-dimensional
carved image, and incorporated into a water spirit headdress in the Niger River
Delta region of Nigeria. Examples of this snake charmer/ Mami Wata hybrid appear
on glass paintings and prints displayed here, as well.
By the early twentieth century traders from Lebanon and India began to arrive
in Africa. Images in Indian books, pamphlets, films, and popular devotional
chromolithographs came to have a profound impact. The popularity of the snake
charmer poster and the Indian presence in West Africa led to a growing
fascination with prints of Hindu gods and goddesses. Some Mami Wata devotees
began to interpret these deities as representations of a host of mami and papi
wata spirits associated with specific bodies of water.
Using these prints as guides, they expanded the pantheon of water spirits,
fostering a growing complexity in Mami Wata worship, which came to include
elements of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and other faiths. This complex
fusion of beliefs and images is exemplified by paintings, sculptures, and prints
in this gallery, such as a headdress from Sierra Leone representing a local
water divinity, featuring a Hindu forehead mark (bindi), and with snakes piled
on the head recalling Mami Wata’s snake charming attributes, as well as her
mermaid’s fishtail.
More recently, Ghana has become the site of a burgeoning film and video
industry that often reflects the dramatic rise of Pentecostal Christianity and
its concern with satanic forces. In this context, Mami Wata is recast as a demon
working with the devil. Often depicted with a muscular, aggressive appearance,
in this guise Mami Wata is perhaps designed to evoke fear, as she condenses the
eroticism of the forbidden, yet compelling, pleasures of modern urban life.
Several paintings and a movie poster in this area show this menacingly
seductive—and sometimes demonized—version of Mami Wata.
Mami Wata in Cultural Context
Mami Wata and the innumerable mami and papi wata spirits have many faces, and
their identities rarely remain constant. As conditions change, so do the
attributes, personalities, and actions of these fascinating and enigmatic water
spirits. Case studies presented in this section reveal striking differences, as
well as remarkable similarities, in the beliefs and expressive arts for Mami
Wata and her cohorts in Africa.
First, a selection of Mami Wata headdresses and masks made during the 1970s
and 1980s for Jolly masquerades in Freetown, Sierra Leone shows how young men at
that place and time were concerned about the spiritual and economic powers of
women, who had increasingly entered the workplace. Because women were thought to
have greater powers than men, men sought the help of Mami Wata in their dealings
with the opposite sex. Representations of Mami Wata in Freetown take the form of
dramatically sensual masquerades with ornate headpieces.
In Côte d’Ivoire the educational and humorous performances of Baule and
Guro entertainment masquerades often give Mami Wata a place of prominence. Baule
artists use her image to symbolize novelty, fashionable elegance, and modernity.
This is especially true in portrait masks displayed here that praise the beauty
and status of the mask’s female owner. In private ritual contexts, images of
Mami Wata can represent a person’s “spirit spouse,” the spiritual
guardian/partner of a man or woman. Several such “spirit spouse” sculptures
appear in this section.
The peoples who inhabit the coastal region from Ghana to Togo and Benin have
an intimate association with the sea and with water divinities. They worship a
vast pantheon of spiritual entities, of which Mami Wata is one. Works honoring
Mami Wata, such as the handmade wooden and terra cotta figures in this gallery,
are placed in shrines and temples, to seek her protection and healing. An actual
shrine is recreated to show how such objects would function in situ to
propitiate the spirit.
Ensembles from a Brazilian-inspired masquerade in Ouidah, Benin show the role
that Mami Wata plays in this fascinating masquerade among the Agudas,
descendants of a multi-ethnic mix of liberated and repatriated Africans from
Brazil. A video of this event as well as sculptures and masks from the Ibibio
and Igbo peoples of southeastern Nigeria illustrate Mami Wata’s role in their
cultures, while numerous popular paintings from Democratic Republic of the Congo
suggest how Mami Wata plays an important role in central African urban culture
and spiritual practices.
Mami’s Sisters in the African Atlantic
Africans taken to Haiti aboard slave ships brought with them strong traditions
of fish-tailed and water-related spirits, which were incorporated into Vodou, a
complex and sophisticated religion honoring spiritual entities known as lwa.
Water enters the Haitian Vodou cosmology in many ways. Marine spirits like the
mermaid Lasirèn symbolize the lwa of the water, and are represented in this
section on glittering sequined flags, sculptures, paintings, and elaborate
mixed-media altars.
A recreation of the altar for Santa Marta la Dominadora in the Dominican
Republic, as well as a video of one in use, illustrate the evolution of Mami
Wata’s image as she crossed the Atlantic. In this altar, the black or African
Saint Martha is strong and domineering, surrounded by snakes and serpents. She
inverts the story of Eve in the Garden of Eden as she controls the snake and
embodies extraordinary female power over negative, destructive forces.
Meanwhile, every February 2nd along the northeast coast of Brazil,
descendants of enslaved Africans, as well as many others, turn their eyes and
thoughts toward the watery horizon and pray to the “Queen of the Sea,”
“Mother Water,” the “Mother of Fish,” Yemanja, seeking her love,
support, protection, and guidance. This gallery features a range of objects
associated with Yemanja’s festival, including beautiful ensembles and regalia
for a priestess, as well as a video of the celebration.
Mami Wata as Artists’ Muse
In addition to their influence in Africa and its diasporas, Mami Wata and other
African and African Atlantic water spirits have gained an even wider audience,
as well as new meanings and import, by capturing the imaginations of
contemporary artists. The final gallery of the exhibition features the work of
several artists—men and women from Africa, Europe, North America, and the
Caribbean—who have found in Mami Wata and her cohorts a highly intriguing
subject matter. Works here include paintings, etchings and sculptures by artists
including Alison Saar, Sonya Clark, Bruce Onobrakpeya, Twin Seven-Seven,
Claudette Schreuders and Edouard Duval-Carrié.
Additional Information
After debuting at the Fowler Museum, Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in
Africa and Its Diasporas will be on display at the Chazen Museum of Art,
University of Wisconsin, Madison (Oct. 18, 2008–Jan. 11, 2009); the National
Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (Apr. 1–July
26, 2009); The Mariners' Museum, Newport News, Virginia (Jan. 29–Aug 16,
2010); and the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford
University (Oct 6, 2010–Jan. 2, 2011).
This exhibition was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for
the Humanities. Additional support for accompanying programs was provided by the
James Irvine Foundation, Ralph M. Parsons Foundation, Yvonne Lenart Public
Programs Fund, Jerome L. Joss Fund, Shirley & Ralph Shapiro Director's
Discretionary Fund, Hitachi Foundation, and Manus, the support group of the
Fowler Museum at UCLA.
The Fowler is open Wednesdays through Sundays, from noon to 5 p.m.; and on
Thursdays, from noon until 8 p.m. The museum is closed Mondays and Tuesdays. The
Fowler Museum, part of UCLA Arts, is located in the north part of the UCLA
campus. Admission is free. Parking is available for a maximum of $8 in Lot 4.
For more information, the public may call 310/825-4361 or visit fowler.ucla.edu.
Related Programs
Saturday, April 5, 2008 5 pm Fowler OutSpoken Lecture: Henry J. Drewal
Mermaids, Snake Charmers, Sirens and Saints: The Many Faces of Mami Wata Curator
and art historian Henry Drewal traces the history and evolution of water spirits
known as Mami Wata, a Pidgin English rendering of “Mother Water.” Drawing on
art and imagery from Africa, the Caribbean, Brazil and the United States, Drewal
identifies the many sources—African deities, European mermaids, Hindu gods and
goddesses, snake charmers and Christian and Muslim saints—that have merged
through the years to embody this celebrated figure of the African and
African-Atlantic world.
6–8:30 pm Members’ Opening and Preview Party Dive into a vibrant nighttime
undersea adventure, when the Fowler Museum is transformed into a beguiling,
seductive world of larger-than-life sea creatures and mischievous water spirits.
Celebrate the dynamic creative power of Mami Wata with surprises to tempt all
your senses. Sea-life inspired costumes encouraged! RSVP by Friday, March 28th:
310/206-0306 or fowlermembership@arts.ucla.edu. Not a member? Join online at
fowler.ucla.edu.
Sunday, April 6, 2008 12–5 pm Opening Day: Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas
1–4 pm Kids in the Courtyard: A Mermaid’s Tail
Get ready for the festival, Splash! A Celebration of Mermaids and the Sea, by
fashioning watery wear perfect for a merfolk masquerade at this drop-in art
workshop.
2–4 pm Fowler OutSpoken Panel: Mami as Muse
The work of contemporary artists from Africa and the Americas demonstrates the
power and continuity of Mami Wata as a source for creative inspiration. Visual
artists Bolaji Campbell, Eve Sandler and Sonya Y. Clark, along with filmmaker
Giovanni Savino, discuss their works in the Fowler’s current exhibition in
this conversation led by curator Henry Drewal examining the relationship between
Mami Wata devotion and artistic expression.
Saturday, April 19, 2008 11:30 am – 3:30 pm Festival: Splash! A Celebration of Mermaids and the Sea
The Fowler welcomes all ages to a fun-filled day celebrating art, mermaids, the
environment, and more! Enjoy unforgettable performances by dance sensation Viver
Brasil and the L.A-based, Congo-inspired group Balobi Bandeko; fabulous art
workshops; water-science attractions including sea creature touch tanks
(provided by community partner Heal the Bay); and a variety of food and vendor
booths. Dress up as a group or on your own, and take part in our merfolk
procession honoring Mami Wata. For a detailed schedule or to download a parade
application, visit fowler.ucla.edu.
Sunday June 1, 2008 2 pm Fowler OutSpoken Lecture: Marilyn Houlberg
From Seduction to Death and Beyond: The Lure of Lasiren, the Mermaid Queen in
Haitian Vodou
Anthropologist and art historian Marilyn Houlberg discusses the water spirits of
Haitian Vodou including: Lasirèn, the beautiful but potentially deadly mermaid;
Mami Wata, the snake charmer; and other spirits ranging from snakes to winged
dragons. Houlberg will consider how Lasirèn—who lives beneath the surface of
the sea in a bejeweled domain, and others, who manifest themselves in violent
storms, waterfalls and even quiet dew—are depicted by artists in beaded and
sequined ceremonial flags, temple mural walls, altars, as well as through dance,
in documentaries and Hollywood films.
Sunday, June 29, 2008 1–4 pm Kids in the Courtyard: Charmed by a Snake
Search the exhibition for Mami Wata as a snake charmer and then get up close and
personal with live pythons and their reptile friends, brought to the Fowler by
World Famous Lizard Boy’s Mobile Zoo.
4 pm Summer Sunset Concert
Details to be announced.
KidsMuse Summer Art Camp 2008
Art-making activities and more in conjunction with Mami Wata: Arts for Water
Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas
Session I for 6–8 year olds July 14–18, 2008
Session II for 9–12 year old July 21–25, 2008
Members $100; Non-members $150. Information: 310/825-7325
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Mami Wata (circa 1987) by
Zoumana Sane
Babembe
Sculpture
