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The Menil collection African Galleries Re-Installation

The Menil Collection

1515 Sul Ross
Houston, Texas 77006
Tel: 713-525-9400
Fax: 713-525-9444

http://www.menil.org/tribal.html 

The Menil Collection is a unique museum environment located in the Montrose-area Museum District housing the collection of John and Dominique de Menil. The museum building is the centerpiece of a neighborhood featuring satellite gallery spaces and related cultural institutions set in a parklike setting.

The Menil Collection African Art

Mask Yaka Democratic Republic of the Congo - Antelope Headdress (Ciwara) Bamana Mali -  Kneeling Male Figure Inland Niger Delta, Mali 11th-17th century

Dogon 

Kneeling Woman with Child, 16th–17th centuries
Mali, Bandiagara Escarpment; Dogon people
The Menil Collection

Reopened April 11, 2008

new exhibition: September 26, 2008- January 4, 2009

Through their foundation, dedicated to “the human encounter,” John and Dominique de Menil acquired more than one thousand African objects from the 1950s onward. As profound humanists, the couple believed that all peoples struggle with meaning, and that art is a way by which cultures and individuals seek to better understand themselves and their place in the world.

The artworks in the African collection focus on the human form and so offer insight into a range of human experiences: a Dogon mother and child figure that speaks to birth and regeneration, a terra-cotta from the Inland Niger Delta of Mali depicting a body ravaged by disease, and a Kongo power figure seeking out the spiritual source of affliction in the world provide but a few examples. From the perspective of the de Menils’ vision, these objects are evidence of how African cultures have celebrated existence, related to their surroundings, and confronted questions of human meaning. These objects, like the de Menils’ collection as a whole, afford spiritual insight to us today.

Power figure (Nkisi Nkondi), 19th –20th century
Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, or Angola; Kongo people
The Menil Collection

The re-installation of the African galleries will involve nearly one hundred objects from the collection, many of which have never previously been on view at The Menil Collection. (The galleries were originally installed by Dominique de Menil and her colleagues in 1987, when the museum opened, and have remained largely intact since that time.) The galleries will be reconfigured to allow an exploration of the human form in sculpture, ranging from the miniature to the life-size, abstract to naturalistic, male to female, and familiar to foreign. It will consider how various African cultures represent their place in the physical and spiritual world, and how they communicate with their fellow living beings.

The re-installation and catalogue are generously supported by The Brown Foundation, Inc., Mr. and Mrs. Peter Hoyt Brown, The Hobby Family Foundation, and the City of Houston


Constantine PetridisLECTURE: Tuesday September 23, 2008
7:30 p.m.

Constantine Petridis
“Art and Power in the Central African Savannah”
Dr. Constantine Petridis, curator of African art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, organized this exhibition that draws on the cultures of five sub-Saharan African peoples. He discusses the show's fifty resonant examples of carved wooden objects known as power figures, commonly in the shape of humans or animals.

Constantine Petridis

Art and Power in the Central African Savanna September 26, 2008- January 4, 2009

Power figures, once commonly referred to as fetishes, are among the best-known and most striking examples of religious art in sub-Saharan Africa. Commonly in the shape of humans and animals, these carved wooden objects were used by a large number of people in Central Africa's southern savanna as containers for medicinal substances. They were symbols of status that also acted as mediators between the human and spirit worlds. While scholars of African art have often suggested that religious and political sculpture are two distinct classes of objects, this exhibition demonstrates that such classifications do not hold for power figures. They are at once political and religious.

Organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art, the exhibition “Art and Power in the Central African Savanna,” will feature art from four different African cultures: the Chokwe, the Luluwa, the Songye, and the Luba. In all four cultures, social, political, and economic changes during the nineteenth century brought about stylistic changes in power figures. As these chiefdoms' political structures became more centralized, sculptures acquired new meanings associated with status, authority, and leadership, all while retaining their spiritual or magical values. Comparisons will be made between earlier styles, which were often more abstract and aggressive in their aesthetic, and later ones, which are more refined and show an attention to detail.

This exhibition will feature a selection of approximately fifty works of the highest quality from public and private collections in the United States and Belgium. Curated by Dr. Constantine Petridis, Associate Curator of African Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, “Art and Power in the Central African Savanna,”will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog that will include four scholarly essays, color plates, and historical field photographs. The exhibition will travel to the de Young Museum in San Francisco and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

This exhibition is generously supported by Mr. and Mrs. Robert L. Gerry III, in honor of Louisa Stude Sarofim, and by the City of Houston. 

you can read more about it at Art and Power in the Central African Savanna 

and also in the archives: Menil-Houston-Texas | Texas museums

 

 

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