Pam McClusky

According to Pam McClusky, Yoruba art is filled with ashe, or “the power to make things happen.” In performances, masqueraders called Egungun, or “beings from beyond,” enact movements that no one can explain. Gelede masks are worn to enact parodies of different personalities. In sculpture, the Yoruba depict a wide array of deities that are akin to those of the ancient Greeks. In her lecture, McClusky will discuss these traditions and describe how Yoruba rituals still thrive in Western Nigeria as well as Brazil, the Caribbean, London and even New York.

McClusky has published extensively about African art and has organized numerous exhibitions on the topic. While a graduate student at the University of Washington, she discovered African art in the basement of the Seattle Art Museum and convinced the director to place the collection on view. In 1980, she helped establish the Department of African and Oceanic Art at the museum, and she has served as its curator since 1996. She also established a series of permanent galleries to house the Seattle Art Museum’s collections of African and Australian Aboriginal art.

Pam McClusky, curator of African and Oceanic art at the the Seattle Art Museum, helped SAM establish its department in 1980 while a graduate student at the University of Washington. The following year the museum benefited by receiving the extensive Katherine White collection of African art. Now, McClusky says, SAM's African collection ranks among the nation's top 10 and the Australian aboriginal gallery in the new expansion is a first for a public institution in the U.S.

McClusky installed the African, Australian and textile galleries with an eye to connecting them to artworks and cultures in the surrounding spaces. "It's a chance to rethink how we present [the artwork] with entirely new interpretations," she says. "So many people think of Africa as alien, but there are so many familiar elements — and look at how it interacts with the rest of the collections."

Real also: Hallie Ford Yoruba Art & Sculpture at Hallie Ford: Selections from the Mary Johnston Collection January 19-March 16, 2008

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