‘Beads’ Lights Culture of the Yoruba

Fascination with little things that shine and glitter probably represents something close to a universal human reflex. Old movies show people hypnotized by Bela Lugosi dangling a crystal or coin. A vintage musical comedy song advises the girl to get her man by wearing baubles, bangles and beads.

The current exhibition at UCLA’s Fowler Museum demonstrates how one of Africa’s great traditional peoples uses the humble bead as the conceptual lodestar of its aesthetic. “Beads, Body and Soul: Art and Light in the Yoruba Universe” is a rare combination of mesmerizing diversion and breakthrough scholarship.

The Yoruba culture, centered in southwestern Nigeria, spreads to parts of modern Benin and Togo. The current population is estimated at around 25 million, which includes the offspring of those transported to the New World as slaves. Among the 150 objects on view are examples of modern Yoruba beadwork from Cuba to Brazil and the U.S.

Traditional Yoruba art is a long-standing favorite of scholars and connoisseurs. However, most of the small legion of exhibitions devoted to it concentrate on its wooden masks and sculpture. They form a kind of classic middle ground between the courtly bronzes of Benin and the expressionist power of Zaire’s fetishes, at once elegant and powerful.

“Beads, Body and Soul” is a major traveling exhibition organized by the museum. It comes with a lavishly illustrated 400-page publication representing a quarter-century of fieldwork by curators Henry Drewal of the University of Wisconsin and John Mason, director of the Yoruba Theological Archministry in New York. All that may strike some as overkill of the insignificant. It’s an impression that vanishes with one look at the work.

There are spectacular royal beaded crowns, such as a white example topped by an elephant with a curious bird on his back. A veil of vertical beads cascades from the hat, masking the wearer’s face mysteriously. A conical cap covered with some 12,000 cowrie shells is called “the house of the head.” There are slippers, thrones, masks and series of magnificent tableaux showing the traditional regalia of priests and diviners.

Looking, one has the decided sense of witnessing a kind of concrete poetry that rhymes the universe. As it turns out, that’s exactly what’s happening. Like most African peoples, the Yoruba believe in the coexistence and interpenetration of the realms of the living and the dead.

Permutations of these worlds are expressed through color categories that join ideas of temperament and sensations of heat. These bear surprising similarity to European theories of color and the medieval humors theory. The Yoruba designation Funfun, for example, includes white, silver, gray and chrome. They’re said to embody qualities of cool, calm, composure and actions that are thoughtful and deliberate.

These are the colors used in the tableaux representing the god Obatala. Its magisterial, almost icy detachment conveys meaning in a way that requires no explanation.

In other configurations, the heat and aggression of red and yellow is contrasted with the moderation and variability of cool, dark colors like black and blue. All the categories are intermixed with remarkable expressive accuracy. The god of earth, pestilence and death is, not surprisingly, symbolized by black. What gives the piece its power, however, is a central figure--a kind of straw man that speaks of our inescapable vulnerability.

A shrine to the hunter god suggests something of the existential absurdity of our need to ennoble predatory instincts. It uses a background of modern camouflage canvas and up-to-date stalking togs, such as a white hunter’s hat transformed through beading. The best touch in the piece is a whisk formed from an antelope’s hoof and a long, silky tail.

Works express a sophisticated understanding of life’s paradoxes. The Ibeji symbolize a pair of sacred twins. Represented by a pair of identical seated figures barnacled in shells, they stand for those bounties that can mean either double fortune or double trouble.

This illuminating exhibition casts light all around it. Anyone ever puzzled by sculpted Yoruba figures covered in white polka-dots now knows they function, like the beads, as points of light. Anyone interested in contemporary body and performance art is reminded these folks got there first. Yoruba art reminds us that, like life and death, art and life are--or should be--inextricably intermixed.

* UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, through July 19, closed Monday and Tuesday, (310) 825-4361.