By GEORGETTE GOUVEIA Found at nynews.com on October 12, 2007

When Purchase College's Neuberger Museum of Art opened in 1974, it featured 20th-century American art from founding patron Roy R. Neuberger as well as African art from other collectors.

 

 

This weekend, the museum celebrates the importance of African art to its mission with a reinstallation that underscores the collection's rich symbolism, sensuous craftsmanship and textural variety.

"What this has done is to give cohesiveness to the museum, with the American collection upstairs and just below it, the African collection," says Marie-Thérèse Brincard, curatorial adviser to the Neuberger's African art collection

 

By moving the collection to the refurbished West Gallery - in effect the Neuberger's creamy, beautifully lit front parlor - the museum is able to more than double the number of objects on display.

There are now close to 100 masks, headdresses, costumes, figurines, staffs, vessels and other artifacts on view, representing about one-third of the museum's African holdings. These were gifts from such collectors as Eliot P. and Aimee W. Hirshberg, friends of Roy Neuberger, and Lawrence Gussman, who first visited central Africa in 1957 when Dr. Albert Schweitzer invited him to work in his hospital in Labarene, Gabon.

While Neuberger himself - now 104 years old - does not collect African art, he has encourage its addition to the museum that bears his name.

"That's his vision - open and accepting," Brincard says. "When I interviewed him, he told me: 'The Neuberger Museum of Art must keep moving. ... It has to be an electrifying space. The reinstallation of the African collection internationalizes our institution and broadens our lives.' " 

Mark Vergari/The Journal News Marie-Thérèse Brincard, the curatorial adviser for the Neuberger Museum's African art collection, stands in the new exhibit at the museum on the campus of Purchase College.

Few cultural experiences are more sweeping than Africa - 57 countries, 900 million people, 1,000 languages.

"What we've tried to create is what the visitor gets out of Africa, which is a huge continent," Brincard says.

The new installation, which embraces more than 30 societies stretching from Mali in the west to Mozambique in the east, nevertheless distills the vastness of the African experience for the viewer.

It is organized into the four regions in which the objects, mainly 19th- and 20th-century wood sculptures, were produced - western Sudan, the Guinea Coast, central Africa and southern Africa. Banners announce different thematic sections, such as "Masks and Masqueraders" and "Commemorating the Ancestors."

 

An angular design and minimal accompanying text (gallery handouts and family guides are available) offer visitors an unobstructed view of Africa's duality - ancient and modern, sharp and curvaceous, utilitarian and decorative.

Usefulness is no impediment to an object's beauty, Brincard says. During a recent tour as the reinstallation neared completion, Brincard pointed to an exquisite headrest, made of wood and beads by the Luba peoples of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the late-19th to early-20th centuries. The headrests kept their elaborate coiffures from falling victim to bed head. In this beauty, the headrest is held aloft by the carved figure of a sturdy woman.

The scarification of the figure's exposed flesh is not just pretty decoration, Brincard says, but a means of storytelling.

In African art, everything signifies something else. The early-20th century Female Twin Figures of the Yoruba peoples of Nigeria represent a blessing. The incidence of twins and, unfortunately, their mortality rate are high among the Yoruba. When one twin dies, the Yoruba sculpt a figurine to contain and soothe the deceased's spirit. The smoothness of the figures and their adornment with beaded jewelry recalls the love that the twins' mother lavished on them.

Among the most poignant illustrations of Africa's marriage of utility and craft is a Male Reliquary Guardian Figure made by the Fang peoples of southern Cameroon before 1916. Once it would've stood watch over a box containing honored ancestral bones. Now it stands in a corner of the West Gallery that spotlights is lustrous wood and pigment.

What is moving, however, is the unmistakably contemplative cast to the figure's button eyes and hands joined at the midsection, even though these aspects are somewhat abstract. This soulful sentinel is accompanied by a quote about reliquary guardians from a Fang elder: "Their faces are strong, quiet, and reflective. They are thinking about our problems and how to help us. We see that they see."

Brincard stops by another Male Reliquary Guardian Figure - this one from the Fang in Gabon - whose features are more pronounced. At a moment when The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan is presenting a show on the African reliquary, she says, the Neuberger has several fine examples, gifts of Lawrence Gussman in memory of Schweitzer.

Not all the works are part of the permanent collection. Among the loans is a mid-20th century clay Beer Container made by Zulu women in South Africa for brewing and sharing a sorghum-based beverage.

Brincard pronounces it perfect, and you can't but concur as your eye follows its smoothly curving fan shape upward to the tight circular opening.

The curator hopes to refresh the display from time to time with more loans and other holdings, proving, as she says, that "everything new is at the Neuberger."