Past Exhibitions
Works from the Continent of Africa
This installation presents the ways in which the aesthetic values and worldviews of different African socities in the past are still relevant to the contemporary social imaginary of the vast majority of people in Africa. Whereas some museums continue to treat canonical African art as vectors of source cultures, this installation emphasizes the individual autonomy of the objects on view. The selection is organized around six themes: Figures, Parliament of Masks, Power Objects, Transitions, Art of Small Things, and Art of Everyday.
The Craft of Art
Eric van HoveLocation: Jaffe-Friede Gallery, Hopkins Center, Open Tues.-Sat., 12:30-10:00 PM, Sun. 12:30-5:30 PM
In collaboration with the Studio Art Department and Dartmouth’s Artist-in-Residence Program, the Hood Museum of Art presents recent works by visiting Belgian artist Eric van Hove. Born in Guelma, Algeria, van Hove was raised in Yaoundé, Cameroon. In 2011, he moved to Marrakesh, Morocco, where he created his breakout V12 Laraki, an exact replica of the Mercedes-Benz engine of the same name, recently acquired by the museum. Produced in collaboration with about fifty-five local craftsmen, the sculpture showcases van Hove’s ingenuity and the brilliance of Maghreb craftsmanship. In addition to the majestic V12 Laraki, the exhibition includes an exploded V12 engine gearbox, and five smaller parts, all meticulously handcrafted using different techniques and with materials sourced from around Morocco.
Selections from the African Collection
The Art of Weapons
This exhibition explores the Hood Museum of Art's extraordinary collection of African weapons for the first time. It focuses on the aesthetic quality of the objects, and on the ways in which they reflect notions of masculinity, warriorhood, and ideal male beauty in traditional African societies. Because the weapons are in a Western museum's collection, the exhibition also considers Western notions of masculinity, as represented in the collecting practices of those Christian missionaries, colonial administrators, military officers, big game hunters, and explorers who acquired most of these weapons in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Although the exhibition draws from several cultures in the five sub-regions of Africa, it is not a broad survey of African weapons. Instead, it presents exemplary highlights from the Hood's extensive collection, categorized as "offensive" and "defensive" weapons.
Successive African art curators at the Hood Museum of Art have assembled an extraordinary and holistic vision of the arts of Africa that encompasses both important historical milestones and the multiple cultural and social vistas of this continent. Acquired over the past two years and on view together for the first time, these thirty-one exceptional objects map the contour of modern and contemporary African art from the 1960s to the present while also shedding critical light on the diversity of African artistic practices by multiple generations of artists. The installation includes an exciting array of paintings, photographs, sculptures, drawings, ceramic, and mixed media, including works by Ibrahim El Salahi, Lamidi Fakeye, Akin Fakeye, Owusu-Ankomah, Victor Ekpuk, Chike Obeagu, Candice Breitz, Nomusa Makhubu, Julien Sinzogan, Aida Muluneh, Halida Boughriet, Mario Macilau, Eric van Hove, Khulumeleni Magwaza, and Nidhal Chamekh.
Works by Victor Ekpuk
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Nigerian-born artist Victor Ekpuk is best known for his improvisational use of nsibidi, a form of ideographic writing associated with Ekpe, the powerful, interethnic men’s association active in the southern border regions of Nigeria and Cameroon. Though familiar to him since his childhood, Ekpuk’s aesthetic engagement with nsibidi emerged during his fine art studies at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ife, Nigeria, where students were encouraged to explore the logics of pattern and design in indigenous African art forms. Ekpuk’s fascination with nsibidi during these years—its economy of line and encoded meanings—led to his broader explorations of the visual properties of linguistic signs and to the invention of his own fluid letterforms. As a mature artist, Ekpuk has so internalized the rhythm and contours of his “script” that it flows from his hand like the outpouring of a personal archive.
Ukara cloth symbolizes the power, wealth, and prestige of the Ekpe secret society, an interethnic all-male association, and the sacrality of Ekpe meeting lodges. Although commissioned and used by the Ekpe, located in the Cross River region at the border of southeastern Nigeria and western Cameroon, ukara is designed, sewn, and dyed by the Ezillo people in present-day Ebonyi State. The process of creating ukara cloths is laborious and involves many hands, but ultimately each cloth is highly individualized, clearly produced to be worn by a specific Ekpe person or to mark a particular Ekpe lodge. Nsibidi symbols, an ideographic and gestural system of communication, are dyed onto the cloth. The symbols’ meanings are largely guarded by Ekpe members, with more established members becoming deeply knowledgeable about the poly-semantic signs.