PROFILE : UCSB Professor Unmasks Mysteries of African Art : Herbert (Skip) Cole is renowned for his study of many non-Western cultures. He also shares his enthusiasm with the community.

As African Art History Professor Herbert (Skip) Cole spoke to the 100 or so UC Santa Barbara students packed into a lecture auditorium, slide projections of shrine art and animal spirit masks danced across his face and seemed to confirm the esoteric dimension of the art forms.

I wondered whether he might be preparing an initiation ceremony on the spot. Captivated by his imposing stature, white hair, sterling blue eyes and lively gestures, I thought perhaps he’s a shaman in disguise.

What I was soon to learn was that Cole is a leading scholar in the field of African art history who also possesses a broad knowledge of the rich and varied artistic cultures of many non-Western societies.

Cole also brings his enthusiasm for the exotic arts to the community at large through Friends of Ethnic Arts, a local organization he founded in 1982 with a group of art-history lovers who were eager to continue sharing their interests in pre-Columbian, Oceanic and African arts.

Open to anyone, the organization helps bridge the gap between the local community and the university, and between the modern West and other cultures.

As program chair of Friends, Cole schedules the many art historians, curators, photographers and performers who present their work to members and the general public. Recent guests have included Smithsonian Curator Mary Jo Arnoldi speaking about Mali puppet masquerade and Michelle Kisliuk of UCSB performing and discussing the musical sounds of Central Africa.

Cole, 60, is ranked among the most luminous of African art historians and ethnographers--the likes of Roy Sieber, Henry and Margaret Drewel and Susan Vogel. He is widely acknowledged as the first scholar to focus on the importance of art in Africa as process as opposed to product.

Take a seminar with Cole and chances are he will share with you a proverb from the Igbo of Nigeria: “You do not stand in one place to watch a masquerade.” The proverb applies specifically to the fluidness of the masquerade experience and, in general, to the multiple perspectives needed to understand the wide range of cultural arts in Africa, from handcrafted furniture to ceremonial objects and performances.

“Artistic ensembles and processes are everywhere in Africa far more than works of art, and this is perhaps why few African peoples have needed a word or even a concept that translates precisely as art ,” Cole says. “These forms are often instrumental works of culture that stand out in the lives of African peoples and their communities. These works are above all vital, expressive, affective and conventionalized according to carefully guarded values.”

For his own part, Cole hasn’t stood in one place to study the arts of Africa, either. His unique achievement among Africanists, according to University Museum Director Marla Berns, is that “despite his seminal works on specific cultures in West Africa, including the Igbo peoples of Nigeria and the Akan-speaking peoples of Ghana, he also has the ability to step back and look at the bigger picture with an enhanced understanding of African art and culture.”

Beginning with his field inquiries on the ritualized construction of Igbo mbari houses and his 1968 UCSB exhibition, “African Arts of Transformation,” and carrying through to his more recent work on cross-cultural artistic models, including the 1979 exhibitions volume “Icons,” Cole has consistently attempted to treat African arts holistically.

“From the transformations of the individual body with various ensembles of adornment to transformations of an entire community in festival,” Cole says, “art objects and rituals make belief systems visible and help order human society.”

Cole’s scholarship serves foremost as the instrumentation of his great passion for the diverse artistic expressions of Africa. He was one of the first Africanists in art history to base his published writing on his own field work. During his first trip to southeastern Nigeria in 1966, the Biafran war forced him to take flight from the small town he lived in and cross the Niger River. Warned by a friend and informant that he didn’t want to be “the last white man left in Owerri,” he left under cover of night in a canoe after the only bridge had been blown out.

Undiscouraged, Cole returned to Africa nine more times--to Mali, Kenya, Cote D’Ivoire as well as Ghana and Nigeria. “There are only a handful of individuals in the field who will make contributions specifically for the good of the discipline,” says Marla Berns. “Skip is currently set upon the un-coveted task of co-authoring a textbook for this reason, and he is always reading other people’s work and providing feedback.”

Cole’s first love, the arts of West Africa, will be the subject of a Friends of Ethnic Arts program tonight at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. Friends steering committee chairwoman Ditte Wolff gives a slide presentation and talk on “Weaving, Dyeing and Casting in Village Life in Cote D’Ivoire,” based on her recent trip to West Africa.

Details

* WHAT: Slide presentation on West Africa by Ditte Wolff.

* WHEN: 8 p.m. today.

* WHERE: Farrand Hall, Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.

* HOW MUCH: Free to Friends of Ethnic Arts members; $4 for non-members.

* CALL: 893-3501.