‘Praise’ Examines Variety of African Women’s Roles

“In Praise of Women: Selected African Sculpture From the Walt Disney-Tishman African Art Collection” is, overtly, about the panoply of cultural roles played by women. On view at the California African-American Museum in Exposition Park, the exhibition makes its point with explanatory wall texts and 34 pertinent examples.

Viewers are informed that there--like everywhere else--most women fulfill their biological destiny as brides, mothers and nurturers. If one feels slightly underwhelmed at being reminded of this universal condition, there is more. Patient labels go on to explain that African women also act as teachers, politicians, doctors and soldiers. In the spiritual realm they fill job descriptions closely related to those of marriage counselor and psychotherapist. Among some groups the principal deity is embodied as a woman.

If one feels rather more reminded than enlightened by all this, the theme also conveys a certain sense of comfort. Our media-driven culture creates an impression of alternating miracles and disasters transforming the planet by the hour. An exhibition like this sees a human cycle that persists fundamentally unchanged for millenniums. The deck gets shuffled and dealt, but the cards are always the same.

Yet differences both obvious and subtle exist between the way women play their roles in communal African societies and the way they act them out in the fragmented West. Sorting all that in detail is the work of cultural anthropology, but aesthetics provide key structural insights.

No matter what African art depicts, its imagery tends to symmetry. It looks unmoving, fixed and timeless. Since the Renaissance, Western art has been largely asymmetrical. There’s some truth in the implicit suggestion that African art leans further to spirituality and Western art to dynamism, but the drives aren’t mutually exclusive.

African art is animated by its employment as sacred stage props in various rituals. Western art partakes of timelessness when we treat its products like untouchable icons embalmed in museums.

Viewed our way, however, it strikes me that African art does the better job of balancing between symbolism and realism, thus its profound influence on Western Modernism.

The exhibition contains no more striking objects than two heads of young women. Coverings of antelope skin as well as inset eyes and teeth lend a naturalistic twist to the life-size pieces. Both come from peoples geographically associated with modern Nigeria, the Ekoi and the Efik. Both heads have intricate, curved, horn-like headdresses. Used in elaborate masques for initiations and funerals, they unmistakably depict girls dramatically coiffed for their own ritual coming-out.

Gorgeous, proud and excited, they’d play perfectly well in a music video of Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen.” Yet these are by no means African Barbie dolls. A little contemplation reveals individuality considerably more vivid than a high school graduation photo.

This dual reading between the archetypal and the personal flavors the whole show. Doran Ross, director of the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, was guest curator. One suspects him of selecting double-take examples that obliquely tally with displayed photos of African women.

The didactic point is well taken. A kneeling female figure holding a calabash from the Yoruba people of Nigeria is entirely stylized, yet what comes across is a virtual portrait of a tall, slender, supple girl with prominent eyes and rapt expression.

The importance placed on fertility in African women is unmistakable. A drum from Guinea is held by a squatting nude painted red. Great emphasis is placed on her large breasts. When their symbolic promise goes unfulfilled, diviners are consulted to encourage conception. Among most African peoples a childless woman is something of an outcast.

If most mother-and-child figures on view appear awkward, it’s evidently due to cultural misreading. Not intended to show the tender moments of Western expectation, they function to depict the mother conveying esoteric knowledge to her offspring.

Emphasis on women’s reproductive function dominates the exhibition numerically. Nothing here, however, contradicts the basic idea that--one way or another--women are powerful. A chief’s staff from the Kongo people is topped with a bride carved from ivory. She holds a gourd flask of palm wine for the man’s pleasure, but nothing in her expression suggests subservience.

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* California African-American Museum, 600 State Drive, Exposition Park; through Aug. 3, closed Mondays, (213) 744-7432.