The largest exhibition of African art ever organized by the St. Louis Art Museum began with a chair.
Fashioned from dark wood, brass accents and a hide over the seat, the 19th-century chair was owned by a chief of the Chokwe people in central and southern Africa. It was one of the first African pieces SLAM acquired, in 1943.
The human figures carved all over the chair — some seem to be tradespeople, others wear military or priestly attire — have beguiled museumgoers who want to know what they mean.
“I tell them, well, there's not really a continuous story with a beginning to an end. But that's not to say there isn't a narrative,” said Nichole N. Bridges, the chief curator of “Narrative Wisdom and African Arts.”
The story told by the chair, Bridges said, was to reinforce the social hierarchy of the society, with the chief sitting on top. For formal occasions with the public present, the chief would stand to the side of the seat, so everyone could get a good view.
The piece sparked the idea for the expansive exhibition, which combines sculpture, photography, drawing, textile art and multimedia pieces to tell a story about telling stories. The work on view shows artists holding and passing on inherited wisdom about national origin and identity, social mores and daily life. In many cases, the artwork is the container for information that otherwise circulated only by word of mouth.
The work includes pieces from SLAM’s permanent collection and others borrowed from museums and collections around the world.
Another Chokwe sculpture shows a chief holding a chisanji, an instrument sometimes called a thumb piano. In reality it would have been a court musician who performed, with the chief approving the songs. But the message of the sculpture is that the leader is the keeper and protector of the community’s stories.
Other pieces include an intricately carved ivory tusk that depicts scenes from the ivory trade, including enslaved people, Europeans in suits and Africans wearing European gear. An exquisitely carved monkey or gorilla sits above the scene, eating a banana and displaying an ambiguous expression — perhaps the artist’s wry commentary on the scenes below, said Bridges, an expert on such tusks.
“The exhibition celebrates the perpetuation of knowledge and wisdom across generations, mainly through oral histories and oral traditions and this intersection between the visual and the verbal,” Bridges said.
More recent pieces include a flag mass-produced in Ghana to celebrate President Barack Obama’s election and Mozambican artist Gonçalo Mabunda’s “The Throne of Beyond,” an imposing chair made from munitions gathered off the ground after the end of Mozambique’s long civil war. Rather than conveying an anti-war warning, it speaks to the people’s hard-won self-determination after defeating a ruling party that had been backed by the Soviet Union.
In another contemporary piece, South African artist Sue Williamson presents video portraits of Africans who fled their homes and migrated to other countries. An accompanying soundtrack, available to hear with headphones, includes the subjects talking about their experiences.
Visitors to the exhibition are immediately greeted with an oral history: “Ties That Bind,” a multichannel sound piece by Nigerian American artist Emeka Ogboh. It mixes electronic music with mbem, an ancient performance art of the Igbo people that combines song and speech.
“Embem plays a crucial role in transmitting cultural knowledge and history, and in this piece it narrates the story of the Bantu migration, a significant event in African history,” Ogboh explains in the audio guide to the exhibition.
Igbo musician Nwachukwu Uwakwe narrates the piece, at one point calling out many of the places in Africa to which the Bantu people migrated from Nigeria and Cameroon.
Art, storytelling and music also combined with an opening-weekend performance at SLAM by Yacouba Sissoko, a master of the kora. West African griots have played the kora for centuries while passing down history from generation to generation.
“Each of our songs has a message. Because the best way to send a message is to send them through music, because music is a world language,” Sissoko said from the stage during his performance.
Bridges joined the SLAM staff in 2013 and was promoted three years ago to be the Morton D. May Curator of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.
She led a major refresh of the museum’s presentation of African art in 2018 and later did the same for Oceanic art.
But she was limited by the contents of the museum’s collection, which does not offer a broad survey of African art.
“Visitors to our sub-Saharan African collection galleries have been seeing African art presented as kind of one thing — figure sculpture and wood and masks and some textiles. And so my hope is that with ‘Narrative Wisdom and African Arts,'” Bridges said, “our visitors have a way of putting that presentation into context, by opening up the view to see that African art is actually much more bountiful and much more diverse than what we happen to have in our permanent collection.”
