Contemporary African Artist: Charles Searles

Unfortunately, I missed the Waterloo Center for the Arts visit but am making up for lost time by doing a little research, analysis and comparison on a contemporary African artist, Charles Searles.

After reading his story of how he got where he is today, I was hooked, without even viewing his pieces of art. After studying at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and creating artwork influenced by African use of color, patterns, sculpture and dance, his daughter passed away. His loss inspired him to visit Africa and study in Ghana, Nigeria and Morocco. Searles' journey influenced his African inspired artwork to take a new direction of abstraction while maintaining his patterning and anthropomorphic dancing forms.

The piece above is an excellent example of a sculpture by Searles that shows a biomorphic form of a dancer to an African masquerade while it reminds me of forms seen as a substructure on a African mask that danced for a specific meaning.

This painting is also a good representation of Charles Searles. It incorporates his passion for bright colors, for dance and movement, elaborate patterns and African figures.

Charles Searles takes a view of 'traditional' African art and puts a modern, contemporary spin in it. By using the same traditional concepts of bright colors, masquerades, movement, patterns, and sculpture, he adds the updated element of abstraction. You can find more information and artwork by Charles Searles here: http://www.grnnamdi.com/dynamic/artwork_display.asp?ArtworkID=1022 and http://africanamericanmuseumexhibitions.com/web/exhibitions/about/searles/

Reaction to Articles

Whats more difficult than trying to read 3 controversial articles that are extremely complex in language on content? Well for me, nothing. I tried over and over to be able to understand each article fully, which I think would be pretty much near impossible. Thankfully,  I did grab a few concepts, quotes and questions from Olu Ogubie, Sidney Kasfir, and Yinka Shonibare.

My group discussed the quote from Shonibare of "I've never actually been to an African village, I've only seen one on television." This only starts to describe how bias the world views everyone else, not just Africans. We all assume so much about everyone and everything, that for instance all black people are from a poor, underdeveloped African village because thats all Africa is. Or even that all Iowans are farmers and hicks. Both of which are far from correct. But to be honest, I didn't know what Africa was like either but how would I know? All my life I have been taught little about Africa, I've seen a thousand commercials about helping poor and sick children in Africa and have heard only about the 'small underdeveloped villages' where they wear masks all the time.  So of course we make assumptions based of what we think we know, which we know everything right? Based on these false accusations, Shonibare is challenged to making great art thats controversial, thats different and gets people talking and confused to almost prove a point about who he is, and who he isn't.

A question that I developed after reading all these articles was the difference in how or if our views change? Compared to even 30 years ago, our (American) views I hope have developed more so in becoming more culturally aware. With us overcoming racism, does being an 'other' still have as much of an impact? Although I think we have much more to be educated on to fully change our biases, its something that I hope will slowly disintegrate.

Otherness

This week of articles and class discussions was a nice eye opener to connecting everything we've learned so far and relating it to our own terms. While reading these articles, Imaging Otherness in Ivory and Mami Wata Shrines, I tried to put myself in their respective time periods so it was easier to relate or understand the concept of the "others." Presently, we've all grown up knowing about most of the world, its peoples, cultures, religions and such. But we all know about these 'others' now because of explorers from way back when like we see explained in the articles. Both articles describe the concept of 'others' while showing the effect of interculturation into African visuals.

In the Imaging Otherness in Ivory article by Preston Blier, the word "other" describes the Portuguese that came to Africa, who had an effect on their cultures. For example, The Beni saltcellars depict Portuguese human figures with their white skin, long hair, mustaches, thin and such other features. In the Mami Wata article by Henry Drewal, "others" are featured as any foreigns from across the sea. This includes Europeans, Americans, and even Indians. Basically, anyone they don't know is foreign, or an "other."

Through these "others," African cultures have been influenced in their visual forms, also referred to our class word of interculturation. Blier talks about how the Portuguese are widely seen as a connection to the dead African ancestors because they have white pale skin, speak unintelligible language, possess higher technology and also come from across the ocean, which is a deeper meaning of the connection of the living and the dead. These ideas of connection to the dead are reflected in visual forms, like the cross symbol. In the Kongo, the spiral forms support the European view of transition, death, and life. In Beni, vessels like the saltcellars detail Portuguese features so prominently that it can date it itself. Portuguese figures are often shown in pairs, which also associate with Benin court officials and religious figures and are commonly displayed in active poses. The connection to Beni’s fish motifs supports the relationship of the Portuguese with movement, water and otherworldly realms. Blier links objects held by the Portuguese with their identity of power and prosperity including swords, lances, rifles, manillas, and books. In Sapi, early ivory carvings reference Portuguese foreign figures such as angels, unicorns, crosses, mermaids, lions, eagles and religious acts such as Virgin and Child.

As I talked about in our class discussion, I wondered where we would be if cultures weren't mixed or if we didn't learn from others. Europeans brought great technological advances to Africa and also brought back African cultural knowledge and visuals to the world. Although we as Americans have our own interpretation of other cultures, it is respectively better than nothing. As said by Drewal, "Museums may be windows on other worlds, but they are also mirrors reflecting their creators. By framing our view and directing our gaze, they influence what we see, how we see, and, therefore, what we understand." Another comparison I used to help understand it is by food. In America, we have, for example, Mexican restaurants but its an American version of mexican food and not actual food from Mexico or what Mexicans eat. I have actually been to Mexico several times so its always fun to compare and see the actual difference between the actual and the revised American way. This concept also goes for visual arts and other foreign influences.

Overall, interculturation is very effective in all countries around the world and allows us to learn more about everyone else and to expand our own knowledge. I see so many benefits that came from a bad or scary time but thats how life is and sometimes it takes awhile to see the good in the bad.

Vodou Connections

Vodou is a perfect way to bring alot of cultures and religions together.  It's religion is influenced by beliefs and practices from mainly West African peoples and Roman Catholics. It was created by African slaves who came from European Christian families and applied it to their new home in Haiti. Now the small country of mostly African slave influence practice Vodou in Haiti. This religion of Vodou relates to many things we've talked about in the African arts and practices like communication to the spirits/gods through masquerades, dances and music, and sacrificial practices.

After watching the Black in Latin America: Haiti & Dominican Republic movie, I could really begin to see the relations to African practices we have studied so far. When at a Vodou ceremony, the peoples become possessed by the spirits just like many African cultures do at a masquerade. When putting on a mask, that person becomes that figure and communicates to the audience around them the message of who or what that figure means and represents. This is very similar to the communication received through the godly spirits in Vodou when it takes over a person's body. Also similar to the masquerades, the ceremonies include meaningful music and dances.

Another similar way of communication to the spirits/Gods between Haitian Vodou religion and other African cultures is their sacrificial practices. While they have different performances of sacrificing, it has a similar concept. In the Vodou practices, they use birds, mainly chickens, to cleanse someone of bad or make peace to and then break their legs and also use their blood as an offering to the gods. At bigger ceremonies or at a new year, they also sacrifice a goat as an offering to the gods. In African cultures like the Dogon, the tellem ancestor figures and other shrine objects are sacrificial materials. Instead of killing a specific animal, sacrificial blood is used on specific tellem figures to communicate to the gods for certain request.

A chicken being sacrificed at a Vodou ceremony

After comparing many Vodou practices with different African cultures practices, I can really see the many African influences in the Haitian religion of Vodou. Now I am more curious on our American perception of voodoo and how or why the two get mixed up.

Yoruba

Spiritual Communication

The Yoruba culture is a very spiritual culture, centering its arts on the connection between real world and spiritual world. The ashe is a powerful spiritual life force and the energy of creation, which plays a big role in the Yoruba culture. Multiple Gods all referred to as Orisha also guide them. The spiritual world is reached through the babalawo, the diviner, and the Ifa, the divination. Through all of these aspects of the spiritual and life forces, many Yoruba visuals, like the calabash bowl and the performance of the divination, greatly reflect the communication between real world and spiritual world.

The calabash from Oyo represents the Yoruba cosmos, the aye and orun. This bowl is used for drinking, serving food and also to carry goods to sell at the market.  Its two halves, the bowl and the lid, link to the two parts of the Yoruba universe, aye and orun. The aye means the real, living world. This part of the world includes the knowledgeable ones, the living, the people and the unknowing or children.  So on this part of the calabash, images of women, priests, animals and such might be depicted. The other half is the orun, or the otherworld where Olodumare is the creator. This includes the spirits, Orishas, ancestors and the divination and depicts such gods as Ogun or spirit Oro and Iwin, not to mention the many other Orishas and spirits. The visual impact directly communicates the relationship between the real world and spiritual world. While the two halves can be separate, they are really not a whole until the two parts, or two worlds, are together as one.

Calabash

The Babalawo, the diviner, also connects to the spiritual world through performing an Ifa divination. A tray is used to carry out the communication between the babalawo and the Orisha. This tray, for example, is decorated with Eshu, the god of crossroads who brought together the world of real and spirit while he is bordered with the living motifs such as mothers, farmers and soldiers.  The babalawo performs the communication with the spirit world by chanting stories of the Orisha. He also uses palm nuts and a sculpted Ifa divination tapper to complete the spiritual performance.

Ifa divination tray

These two examples only begin to show the importance of the relationship between the real and spiritual world.  The two cosmos of the Yoruba universe go together like ying and yang. Not only does the Yoruba culture live by the connection between the real world and spiritual world, but also it is visually present in its communication and every day life.

VERSUS

Akua'ba vs. Blolo bla/bian 


There are many ways to connect to the fertility spirits through different figures from around Africa and it's cultures. Although they all have their differences in the form of the figure and how they connect to the spirit, they also have some similarities. The main goal of these figures: to bare a child.

The Akua'ba is a figure from the Asante from Ghana. The story goes that a woman could not have a child and was told to make a wooden baby doll and treat it like her own baby. Eventually, after carrying her Akua'ba doll, the woman became pregnant and gave birth to a healthy baby girl! The practice caught on with other women in the Asante culture and the Akua'ba dolls became a popular tradition. The tradition is now so popular that you can find these dolls almost anywhere for a souvenir.

Aku'ba doll from the Asante.

The blolo bian and blolo bla is from the Baule and is actually a spirit spouse, in both a husband and wife form. A married couple in the Baule culture have a spiritual spouse to make offerings to or spend time with to keep balance with their life and their real spouse. Once a week, a spouse should spend time alone with their blolo bian/blolo bla and make offerings to, such as a wife offering an egg to her blolo bian or a husband breast feeding his blolo bla for the prayers of fertility.

Blolo bla, Baule

These are 2 very different ways to become fertile in different African cultures. The Akua'ba dolls are only for fertility purposes while the spirit spouses can be used for more than fertility problems, such as health, wealth, warding off evil, ect. The spiritual spouses are also to be kept hidden in the sacrificial alter while the Akua'ba dolls are out in the public, being treated like a real child. So although they have their differences, they are still figures used for the purpose of fertility.

Whats Behind the Mask?

Another week in Arts of Africa has passed us by and, for me, the cultures are beginning to get harder to keep separate of whose is what from where with what meaning. Every culture has a mask, or multiple masks with different meanings and significants so I feel like we have studied 40 masks already in 5 weeks. Hopefully by blogging every week, I can think through all the cultures and their masks and keep them straight.

The Bamana masks like the Ndomo are for young boys going through initiation to become a real man. They represent their change in society and in life from young, crazy, wild boys into educated, hard working, tough men who can control their actions and emotions. This culture also has the Ci Wara masks for the age grade groups focusing on agriculture. And the Kore and Komo which regulate a person's place in their society. For example, the Kore horse mask points out the person not wanted in the community, nicknamed the 'ass mask.'

The Bwa masks are the most interesting to me and how they are family owned. Their plank masks have so many figures or characters that all together represent a family, or clan while each individual has their own mask. The movie we watched in class really showed how they interact with each other, their drummer and their audience.  The patterns on the masks are not just for decoration but all the designs and colors have a specific meaning. The only colors used are red, black and white. They also have grass woven into the mask to create more movement in their performance. These masks of the families don't have to be danced by that person, the elder men hand their masks down to a younger man or boy to dance his mask for him. The Bwa also also have leaf masks which are older and represent life cycle, fertility and growth. They consist of a combination of leaves and feathers and after they are danced, the masks go back to the bush and are burned. Doing this enforces the renewal of life, the recreation of creation.

We also read to article The Mask, Masking, and Masquerade Arts in Africa by Herbert Cole which was a great review of the underlying meaning and significance of all masks in Africa. Their not just art, their a part of life in every culture. The article mentioned how a mask is made by the idea of the individual rather than just re-creating the face of them. I think that concept is spot on in how the masks get so elaborate in their decoration of patterns or colors of meanings and significance.

My group also had a discussion of represented vs. embodied. After some deliberation, I felt I really grasped the concept of the difference between the two ideas. The word represented is for the mask itself,  the spirit it represents. A person wears the mask to represent the idea or character. A mask sitting in a museum represents something. On the other hand, embodied is becoming the spirit, the performance of the mask. The dancer is embodied in the mask, he is that character and spirit, not just a dancer wearing a mask. Of the Bwa plank masks, its the difference of wearing the mask of the crazy man and being the crazy man.

The Radiance of the King

This week, I read the article The Radiance of the King by Donald Cosentino which was about Ghana artists creating art, or posters, of famous people, movies and ideas. This specific article was about our U.S. President, Barack Obama and his rise to fame, especially in Africa. These artists started creating posters by using the back of used flour sacks as their canvas. In the early 90's, these posters were known as 'the mobile cinema' which was their entertainment of interpretations of the artist's own imaginations based off a famous person or idea. Most of these artists came from a backgrounds of 'sign painting' or 'sign writing' so most posters included a tag line or quote as well to further emphasis the idea. As technology advanced and more of the population replaced cinema with television, the artists re-invented the posters as 'global image-scapes' portraying the world of politics. This article began to raise some interesting points to me but also lead me to questions about their canvas art.

A major thought or question was are these canvas posters intended to be humorous? As an American with Barack Obama as my President, I see him as a very influential, famous and most important person but the artist have taken him out of context to me and put him into a funny situation. But is that funny to them? As a read on, I learned that they are making these images as re-imagined and personal interpretations, not for the purpose of humor. Like this picture below, Obama is as a depicted as superman. Humorous to me, but to the Ghana artist, it shows Obama ready to save the White House, the U.S. or even the world. 

Obama Ready to Fly to the White and Black House

D.A. Jasper

Another major interpretation of President Obama is God-like. The artist, Stoger, is a very strong believer in religion and that Jesus is a very powerful figure. On this poster below, it quotes "Obama pray to God to Rule American And His prayer Has Been Answered." Among other posters, Obama is also compared to Martin Luther King Jr. and his 'I have a dream..' speech, George Washington as first President to Obama being first black President and Michael Jordan as being a famous black basketball player.

Obama is a Bless
Stoger

An interesting point that really caught my attention is the media revolution that recently occurred in Africa. "Even people who are really poor seem to have access to cell phones. It's down there with a loaf of bread as one of life's great necessities." This line of Cosentino's floored me as such an amazing, upfront and true reality. Cell phones have become such a major part of living that their even used as a print for their clothing! Cosentino ended these thought better than I can re-word. "That does flatten the world. Makes it so much smaller than anyone could have imagined even a few years ago."

Nani Visit's UNI

There is no better way to learn than hands on experience like Nani Agbeli, an Ewa artist from Ghana, showed us in the last 2 days. Not only was it interesting and knowledgable, but it was so much fun and exciting! Nani shared with us the batik process of wax resist dying of cloth and also introduced us to his culture's music and dance rituals.

Batiking was something that I can actually take home with me and keep meaningful. Doing the actual process in person was even easier to connect to what we have learned so far about textiles rather than the helpful video from class or the readings from the book. But of all the techniques of textiles, I'm glad we stuck to stamp dye rather than the more complicated weaving process like kentes. We started the process by choosing what stamps we wanted to use for a pattern. Most stamps are symbols  of meaning while others are just for decoration. Unfortunately, the stamps I chose for my design did not signify and special meaning. I then sketched my 3 different stamps for my cloth design/pattern, dipped my stamps into the hot, melted wax and plotted them. After the wax quickly dried, I folded my cloth, got it wet and dipped it in the purple dye. After a day of setting, I soaked it in hot water and scrubbed off as much of the leftover wax as possible and took it home to iron. Only thing left to do is find a way to wear my new batik!

My Batik! 

Thursday night I went to Nani's drum and dance performance, something we haven't really explored in class yet, so it was very interesting seeing how meaningful it is. His outfit consisted of multiple layers of cloth gathered like a skirt finished off with pants and flared fringe. This outfit is used for stage performance only but when it is danced for the traditional and spiritual reasons before war, they wear only pants or what they will go to war in. The music was made up of beating of the drums accented by sounds Nani made to express feelings of pain from war. There was also a lot of chanting, which to my understanding, was repetitive of questions and answers. The dancing was very intense and was a major cardio workout! Interestingly, certain dance moves represented something spiritual. For example, making the sign of the cross or bowing before the dance is like asking the spirits for protection during war. Doing fighting moves is like being face to face with the enemy without weapons. I tried to keep up with Nani and his furious moves but I wasn't quite coordinated enough, although I did manage a little dance challenge from him! 

Me and Nani in his performance costume!

I wish Nani could visit us throughout the rest of the semester so that we could continue to learn from him! I hope to enjoy more hands on experiences to gain knowledge about arts of Africa!

First African Experience

So I'll be the first to admit that, in the past, art history hasn't been too exciting or interesting to me and I would just get lost in all of it, so I was scared to expect the same with this class about African arts. Instead I was proved wrong, which makes me so happy! :) I don't even know where to start because, so far, every topic has intrigued me to an extent that makes me actually excited for the rest of this semester. 

A certain sculpture is for a spiritual tradition that comes from their culture and it's amazing how it is not just a piece of art by an artist but a piece of every day life. I would have not realized without the movie shown in class and the preface of the book, that it’s almost a shame to be shown sitting in a museum where its presentation is minimal. For example, the masks that the Dogon use for performing a celebration or funeral just look like a mask behind the glass in a museum where its significance is underplayed.

Starting with the Dogon culture, I was immediately interested in the difference of the roles between men and women. How different their lives are seems to be outdated and old fashion with men having authority and power while women are portrayed as a lower level, although still equally important within their community. This is really shown by the use of the granaries that are segregated between the sexes. It seems odd that a family or married couple would have a separate place for goods, money, tools, ect.  Again, art is involved in these everyday huts used for storage by an originally decorated door.

granaries

Another interesting topic of the Dogon is their sculptured figures made of wood used for multiple purposes and meanings with their exaggerated poses and body parts. First, the Tellem nommo figure which is a snake like body figure that represents the continuing of human life. Another figure of the Dogon is the ancestor figure used as sacrificing material. An example is the one with its arms raised for a rain maker used to bring rain to feed the crops and is sacrificed by throwing water on them, talking to their ancestors.  The ancestor couple is also a major figure that shows a man and woman sitting on a stool, which represents the tree of life, with arms around each other. Lastly, the equestrian figure is a man on a horse, which is very powerful and references the Hogon, the spiritual leader.

Tellem Figure

The other group talked about in class was the Asante. They not only have caught my interest in their brightly colored and patterned textiles, which I am excited to explore further with Nani visiting, but their remarkable jewelry and figures. The method used by the Asante of the lost wax casting is so appealing to me because I have used this method before in making jewelry for myself. I can really relate to the process of carving the figure of wax, making a caste of the wax, melting the wax to create where the brass goes to fill the form and going through the heating process to later be cleaned and more refined. It blows my mind that I’ve had the opportunity to do something that sounds so much more important when it’s a process used by the Asante people.

lost wax caste figures

I’m actually very excited and interested in what we will continue to learn about the ‘arts’ of Africa in this class.