Assistant Curator to Speak at Bowers on African Art Trade

As a doctoral student in anthropology, Christopher Steiner surveyed studies of African art. He found a lot of attention paid to its original use in African society but not a word on how the works make their way to the art markets of Europe and America.

He said he believes that is at least partly because African art dealers and collectors would rather not acknowledge the economic side of their pursuit: the way in which ritual objects are transformed into commodities.

Steiner, now assistant curator of anthropology at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History (and an adjunct assistant professor of art history at UCLA), will speak Thursday at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art about his studies of the transnational African art trade, and will screen a documentary film based on his research, “In and Out of Africa.”

Spending 18 months in the Ivory Coast in 1987 and 1988, Steiner studied the structure of the trade in African art objects, and the way in which economic value is conferred on objects by dealers, based on changing and subjective standards of “authenticity.” A book expanding on his dissertation, “African Art in Transit” (Cambridge University Press), was published this week.

African art “exists in three different worlds,” Steiner said in a telephone interview: the original world in which they were created and used; the “middle world” of the African traders, mostly Muslims who feel no connection to ritual religions and see the objects as economic items; and the world of American and European art markets, where “objects are treated as aesthetic items” divorced from their spiritual content.

“Studying the African art trade and the whole issue of authenticity raises issues of racism in this country,” Steiner said, especially regarding attitudes toward the African traders.

“Collectors tend to view them as ignorant,” Steiner said. “They call them ‘runners,’ ” people who “don’t understand the aesthetic value of what they’re carrying.” In reality, Steiner said, the African traders are “very much aware of what they’re doing.”

The film “In and Out of Africa” focuses on a single art dealer who travels from the Ivory Coast to New York with a cache of items, often inventing fantastic tales about the objects for dealers.

The one-hour documentary was produced in 1991 by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Taylor, based on Steiner’s research, and has won numerous festival awards.

* Christopher Steiner will speak Thursday at 7:30 p.m. at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, 2002 Main St., Santa Ana. $5, museum members; $7.50, non-members. (714) 567-3600.