Review: Houston's MFA Dives Into Black Artwork
Exhibition ranges from fine art to folk art all over the world

BY SCOTT CANTRELL

HOUSTON - In a fertile collaboration that would be unlikely in Dallas, no fewer than five Houston art institutions are presenting concurrent exhibitions of contemporary African and black art. And, both visually and emotionally, they pack quite a wallop.

The biggest of the shows, "African Art Now: Masterpieces from the Jean Pigozzi Collection," is at the Museum of Fine Arts. But there are also important displays at the Menil Collection, the Contemporary Arts Museum and galleries at the University of Houston and Texas Southern University.

Amid the bright colors and dazzling patterns of the MFA show, distinctions between "high" and "folk" art are blurred and probably irrelevant. Cartoonish paintings and statues are cheek by jowl with delicate tracery, razzle-dazzle imaginary cities with junk assemblages. And, as one would expect from a continent that's been so plagued with exploitation and genocide, poverty and disease, social commentary is at least implicit.

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Museums throughout Houston are involved

Traditional African masks were an important influence on early 20th-century European art. Think Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon, and plenty of other chiseled, faceted cubist faces. But, considering the rich variety of African cultures, and a recurrent vogue of primitivism in modern European and American art, it's almost surprising that there's been so little subsequent overlap. Or so you might think from this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

If African art hasn't been a major force outside the Third World for three quarters of a century, the MFA show certainly highlights the impact of European and American cultures on African artists. This is true even for the self-taught artists who have become a passion for the Swiss entrepreneur and photographer Jean Pigozzi.

Inspired by a landmark 1989 show at the Pompidou Center in Paris, Mr. Pigozzi hired the Paris-based curator André Magnin to help him collect art from sub-Saharan Africa. To date, Mr. Pigozzi's still growing Contemporary African Art Collection has some 6,000 objects from 93 artists in 20 countries. It's a collection begging for a permanent museum, but so far it's kept in a warehouse.

Some of the extra-African allusions in the MFA show, also curated by Mr. Magnin, are explicitly artistic, as in sendups of Hieronimus Bosch's surreal landscapes by Camille-Pierre Pambu Bodo, from the Democratic Republic of Congo. In a painting called I Do Not Understand, Cheik Ledy, another Congo artist, shows two Africans perplexed by abstract paintings on gallery walls.

In other cases, it's hard to know whether the parallels represent influences or merely coincidences.

The turbulent collages of Willie Bester, from South Africa, suggest an Africanized Robert Rauschenberg. Fanciful, and unsettling, paintings by Cyprien Tokoudagba (Benin) would fit right into a room full of surrealists.

George Lilanga (Tanzania) fills canvases with cartoonish figures and squiggles suggesting Keith Haring gone south. Samuel Kane Kwei (Ghana) supplies a giant Running Shoe that could almost be a Claes Oldenberg, except that it's more detailed than the Dutch artist's work.

Artistic connections aside, some photographs and sculptures in the MFA show suggest broader cultural cross-fertilizations. Black-and-white photographs by Malick Sidibé (Mali) and Lemvo Jean Abou Bakar Depara (Congo) and whimsical sculptures by Siaka Paul and Nicolas Damas (both Côte d'Ivoire) portray dancers in the nightclubs that sprang up in the 1960s and '70s. Africa threw off the yoke of European colonialism, it seems, only to replace it with the hegemony of American pop culture - the latter, of course, rooted in the culture of urban blacks.

The frequent incorporation of French texts reflects France's long and extensive domination. There's a whole wall of labeled small drawings, suggestive of Tarot cards, by Frédéric Bruly Bouabré (Côte d'Ivoire). Chéri Samba's bright-hued paintings often include extended verbiage, as if the person portrayed is speaking directly to the viewer.

Some of the works frankly explore African dreams of American luxury. Philip Kwame Apagya (Ghana) captures smiling Africans in front of painted images of airplanes and a home entertainment center. Bodys Isek Kingelez (Congo) produces glittering models of futurist Las Vegases. (There are more Kingelez creations in a basement exhibit in the Contemporary Art Museum across the corner.)

Detritus of civilization provides raw material for rethinking traditional African masks. Romuald Hazoumé (Benin) turns plastic gasoline canisters into haunting faces, while his countryman Calixte Dakpogan makes splendid grotesques from battered auto fenders and other junk. (The Menil Collection has a sobering Hazoumé installation that uses cut-off dark canisters to evoke a slave ship.)

Other forms from traditional African arts are transmuted, too: unruly spirits in Mr. Lilanga's painted wooden figures, zigzag textiles in Esther Mahlangu's paintings, memorial steles in Efiaimbelo's illustrative poles.

This is only scraping the surface of an exhibition fairly bristling with vivid visual imagery and unsettling social commentary. Beauty, whimsy and tragedy mingle side-by-side in a yeasty celebration of creativity. If there's any justice - an asset too rarely dispensed in Africa - the Houston show should help propel African art into the international prominence it deserves.

E-mail scantrell@dallasnews.com

Museums throughout Houston are involved

BY SCOTT CANTRELL

HOUSTON - In addition to the "African Art Now" exhibition at Houston's Museum of Fine Arts, the Menil Collection and the Contemporary Arts Museum are presenting related shows.

The Menil has devoted a whole gallery to La Bouche du Roi, an installation by Benin artist Romuald Hazoumé. Inspired by an 1802 diagram of a British slave ship, it evokes the ship and its human cargo with rows of sawed-off brownish-black plastic gas containers. Apparently identical, they have subtle bits of individuality: a colored feather here, a twist of rope or strip of beads there.

Commanding the prow are two masks representing the current king of Benin, Agboliagbo, and a colonial regent. Interspersed among the "slaves" are slender green bottles and bowls of the beads, tobacco and spices that were traded for slaves.

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Review: Houston's MFA dives into black artwork

A present-day resonance is illustrated by a video loop of young African men precariously transporting clusters of full gas canisters by motorcycle. "It reaffirms," as Matthew Drutt writes in an accompanying essay, "the historic complicity between western and African powers to exploit Africa's poor in the service of global trade and commerce." An audio track mingles a litany of slave names and the voices of slaves singing lamentations in different languages.

Also at the Menil is a small show titled "Deep Wells and Reflecting Pools," a sobering look at images of blacks in art and artifacts from the museum's collections. Assembled by Houston artist David McGee, it ranges from 18th-century English portraits of well-to-do colonial Africans to kitsch grotesques of a minstrel and a screaming baby on a pot.

There are disturbing portrayals of a slave whipping and a would-be whipping, and even an 1844 bill of sale for two slaves and a horse. But there are also noble busts by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (Why to be Born a Slave?) and Sir Jacob Epstein (Portrait Head of Paul Robeson ).

At the Contemporary Arts Museum the basement gallery features a number of fanciful futurist buildings and city models by Congolese artist Bodys Isek Kingelez. The main gallery upstairs is devoted to "Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970."

The latter ranges from the delicately calligraphic art of Annette Lawrence and Charles Gaines to Chakaia Booker's sinister knot of fragmented rubber tires (Solo for Bass). Danny Tisdale's untitled collage of murky black-and-white photos of a beating takes up where Andy Warhol's electric chair images leave off.

An installation by Jennie C. Jones, Perpetual Dizziness, pays homage to jazz great Dizzy Gillespie with an action photo and little slivers of sound. Karyn Olivier's Bench (seating for one) is an essay in stark urban minimalism.

Rounding out the citywide focus on African and African-American art are exhibitions at the University Museum at Texas Southern University and the Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston.

E-mail scantrell@dallasnews.com

Details

"African Art Now: Masterpieces from the Jean Pigozzi Collection" runs through May 8 in the Caroline Wiess Law Building, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1001 Bissonet, Houston. 713-639-7300 or www.mfah.org.

"Romauld Hazoumé: La Bouche du Roi" and "Deep Wells and Reflecting Pools" run through April 17 at the Menil Collection, 1515 Sul Ross, Houston. 713-525-9400 or www.menil.org.

"Perspectives 145: Bodyz Isek Kingelez" runs through May 1 and "Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970" runs through April 17 at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 5216 Montrose, Houston. 713-284-8250 or www.camh.org.

"J'aime Chéri Samba" runs through May 9 at the University Museum, Texas Southern University, 3100 Cleburn, Houston. 713-313-7011 or www.tsu.edu/about/history/museum.asp.

"J.D. 'Okhai Ojeikere: Hairstyles" runs through March 5 at the Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston, 120 Fine Arts Building, Entrance 16 off Cullen Road, Houston. 713-743-9530 or www.blaffergallery.org.