Museum Carves a Niche for Sale of African Sculpture

The Shona sculptors of Zimbabwe and a few of their American friends at the County Museum of Natural History are doing what many of the art merchants of Venice, Santa Monica and West Hollywood have had trouble doing lately: ringing up sales.

Not many galleries these days can brag about $250,000 worth of sales in less than a week, done largely through word of mouth and a minimum of advertising and promotion. And who knows what the total will be when the last credit card is crunched Sunday?

What has been going on this week at the museum is an interesting spin to institutional fund-raising through a volunteer program--the sale of artists’ works directly to the public.

Complaints are often raised by young artists that museum stores and their mail-order catalogue operations favor commercial producers over the individual artist. They, too, would like an opportunity to have their works sold, say, in gift shops . . . right along with the ever-present books, baubles, bangles and beads. If they do get their works sold through a museum it is usually through rental gallery operations.

What the Natural History Museum and its volunteer group have been doing this week is giving some artists, as well as themselves, a financial break.

The sale began just last weekend in the Dart Gallery and, according to Catherine Krell, the museum’s deputy director, business has been greater than anyone there expected. The stone pieces, handworked pieces of serpentine, soapstone or granite, have become a hot art item in recent years--helped along by such collectors as the Prince of Wales, the Duchess of York, the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Rodin Museum in Paris. The L.A. museum gets a share of the local retail sales as does the sponsoring organization for the traveling sales-exhibit, the Berkeley-based Institute of Human Origins, a research facility for paleontologists and geologists.

While this is the first time the Shona work has been offered in a Los Angeles museum, the institute previously held similar exhibits and sales at the San Diego Museum of Natural History two years ago and at the Pacific Asian Art Museum in Pasadena four years ago. Both efforts were checked out by volunteers from the Natural History Museum before the Los Angeles effort.

The current sale, according to Krell, is the institute’s largest effort, with 1,400 pieces shipped here. The project is the work of volunteers from the museum’s Alliance Board support group.

Each day the display changes as new works are brought out. Since in the world of commerce all business is repeat business, the bringing out of new daily items is designed to attract return buyers. And so far, according to Krell, the strategy seems to be working, with ticket sales steadily rising through the week.

While the Shonas are an ancient tribe in southern Africa, the making of indigenous stone sculpture is a relatively recent project, having been developed in the late 1950s by the then-director of the Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) National Museum, Frank McEwen, who helped teach stone carving to would-be artists.

The stone is quarried in Zimbabwe and handworked into human and animal forms. The artists then rub different grades of sand over the surface to achieve different textures.

Collectors Tony and Laura Ponter of Sebastopol, Calif., work with Zimbabwe officials in taking the works to international exhibits and sales and determining that the artists are properly and directly compensated.

The Shona sculptors are paid in advance of showings for their work, with the price negotiated with officials of the Zimbabwe National Museum. For the Los Angeles show, the Natural History Museum will receive 60% of net profits. That will be used for educational programs and not for operating funds. The Institute of Human Origins receives 40%, according to Joan Travis of Los Angeles, a board member with both organizations and an organizer of the current show and sale.

The project of selling art pieces through a museum has to be carefully monitored, says the Natural History Museum’s Krell. “We have to be able to verify the authenticity of the work and the artists and to make sure that the proceeds are properly distributed. This exhibit and sale fits into the museum’s mission statement and that is to show art and the cultural history of people.”

For some, the idea of museum sales of this sort is disturbing, the equivalent of muddying pristine waters with commercial sludge.

To others it’s no more disturbing than commemorative T-shirts hawked in gift shops by nonprofit institutions.